The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (12 page)

Henry, though, was right. If our marriage collapsed, it was for the simple, stupid reason that the only thing I ever really wanted out of life was children and we couldn’t have them. I assure you all, the pain involved in giving birth is nothing,
nothing
, to the pain of
not
giving birth. It’s funny. I remember how terribly upset I was when he told me about that baby dying on the operating-table and for a long time I wondered why – until it finally dawned on me that his death had had the effect of making me feel childless all over again …

In any event, after the scandal and the sacking and the scary ’phone calls and the flight back to Europe, we fetched up in the South of France with Auntie’s five thousand pounds still in our pockets. And, there, we did what most of you would have done. We did our darnedest to spend it.

We started running with a crowd of English expats in Monte – the usual Riviera riff-raff. There was John Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzjohn – those were the only names they’d answer to – Eddie and Henrietta Arbuthnot, ‘Plum’ Duff Something-or-Other and his boyfriend Dickie – and now I come to think of it, there may have been more than one of those Dickies, wasn’t it so, Henry, I seem to remember that Plum referred to all his boyfriends as Dickie? – and life was a perpetual whirlwind of breakneck drives along the Grande Corniche, hair-raising sessions at the Casino, balmy nights under the sheltering palms – Plum used to call it ‘moonbathing’ – and weekend jaunts across the frontier to San Remo and Ventimiglia. Oh, it was
such
fun and we were, of course, perfectly miserable.

Then I met Raymond Gentry.

Yes, it’s true. I see the surprise on your faces, especially on yours, Chief-Inspector, but it’s all too true. I already knew Ray before he turned up here on Christmas Eve.

But I insist you understand that I never knew him Biblically, as they say, even if in those days that was the only meaning the word ‘Biblical’ had in my life. Frankly, like Cora, I had him down as a pansy. Or a eunuch. And with
his cocktails and his cravats and his cut-glass accent, I felt he was just too perfect an Englishman to be the real McCoy. I assumed he must be some sort of Central European Jew with ideas above his station, though he was too slippery an operator to let anything be proved against him. And I was broad-minded. Lord knows, I was broad-minded.

In any event, the Gentry I met in those years was one of those prettified young men who hired themselves out to escort rich old hags to the Casino and the Carnival while pocketing a few extra bob for themselves along the way. And if I was certainly no hag – though, had Henry and I hung around the Riviera long enough, I’d surely have got there in the end – that was the service he provided for me. While Henry drank away the nights alone in our hotel room, I was looking for somebody – ideally, somebody not too threatening – to accompany me up and down the Croisette. And no more than that.

It’s true, at the beginning he did pay me fumbling court. Once, I recall, he even copied out a poem by Rupert Brooke, altered a couple of names so that it would apply to us, and presented it to me tucked into a corsage of orchids. But it was all really for form’s sake, more of a face-saving exercise than anything else. We both knew where we stood with each other.

Then, one evening, at a party given by the Murphys, Gerald and Sara, at the Hôtel Welcome in Villefranche, he introduced me to an acquaintance of his, Maxime Pavesco.
I never did know what Maxime’s nationality was. He wasn’t Rumanian, even though his name appeared to suggest he was and he did claim to be a close personal friend of Princess Marie. Nor was he Greek or Spanish or Corsican. I actually took him for an Albanian. I always say, if someone doesn’t come from anywhere else, then he must come from Albania.

Now I know what you’re all thinking. How could an Englishwoman like me sink so low as to consort with an Albanian? Well, to be honest with you, I’d have gone out with a Hindoo if he’d had a clean collar and a presentable dinner-jacket.

And Maxime, you see, was just so handsome, so very silky and smoky and seductive. So very,
very
un-English. When we were on the town together, he made me feel desirable all over again. When I saw how other men envied him, just as I could see other women envying me, I no longer felt as though, well, as though I was on my way to becoming a dowdy back number.

Oh, don’t imagine I had any illusions about him. He was a parasite and a sponger and, when he was in one of his moods, he could be a cad. Yet, I can’t deny it, I was proud to be seen with him.

What I came to realise only later, because that contemptible little Ray Gentry had naturally never breathed a word to me, was that I was making an utter fool of myself. Maxime,
my
Maxime, had already done the round of every
lonely, wealthy, middle-aged woman on the Riviera, every not-so-merry widow and not-so-gay divorcee who’d lost, or was prepared to lose, whatever pride in herself she’d once possessed. He was recommended by one to the next like a manicurist or a fortune-teller. If I was second-hand goods, then Maxime was off the slush pile.

It was I, of course, who always picked up the tab. In restaurants I’d slip a few hundred francs into Maxime’s pocket so he could pay the bill and save face – also save a few francs for himself, for I never saw any change. Then, gradually, he no longer cared about saving his face. When he was losing at the roulette tables, and he never did anything
but
lose, he’d brazenly hold out his hand to me for an immediate supply of new funds. Sometimes he’d even stick his fingers into my handbag and draw out a fat wad of notes for himself. And all this in full view of everybody else.

I myself was already so far gone I, too, had ceased caring. I didn’t care a jot when he and I would drop into some fashionable men’s boutique on the Promenade des Anglais and, without worrying whether he might be heard by the shop assistant who was serving us, he’d start wheedling with me to buy him a Lanvin safari suit. I didn’t care that he was nothing but a scheming gold-digger. I knew he was and it meant nothing to me. Or I pretended it meant nothing to me …

Then it happened, the cruellest irony of all. I discovered I was expecting his child. I, who had for so long hoped to
have not just one but lots and lots of children with Henry, there I was, pregnant by an Albanian gigolo!

Well, as I’m sure you understand, no matter how strong my maternal instinct, there was never any question of having and keeping such a child. Which was when, all very neatly, all very conveniently, Ray Gentry popped up again in my life.

I suppose Maxime had told him about the plight I’d got myself into. Or else – or else from the beginning the whole business had been a set-up job between the two of them. Whichever it was, Ray just chanced to know of a Chinawoman in Toulon who would perform a nearly painless operation – I recall the relish, the malevolent relish, with which he enunciated that word
nearly
– for a few francs. How few, I asked him. Twenty, he replied. Twenty francs? I repeated. I was relieved but also disbelieving. No, was his answer, twenty thousand.

That’s right. Twenty thousand francs. It was blackmail pure and simple, though Raymond naturally never used the word nor any euphemism for it. Nor did he even hint that, if I were to refuse to pay up, he’d start spreading the dirt all along the Côte d’Azur – as smoothly as marmalade on toast. He didn’t have to drop any hints. We both knew exactly what he was up to.

So now it was my turn to be the bearer of bad news to Henry. We were a sorry pair all right, he and I. And maybe – maybe we each of us had to drink our poison to the very dregs before we could face ourselves again.

Without, I have to say, a single word of reproach, Henry gave me what I needed. I went to Toulon and had my insides skewered by a cackling Chinese witch, skewered so crudely – yes, I see from your faces you’re ahead of me – skewered so crudely that, even if I still wanted children, I couldn’t have any. Though, as it happens, all I do want (now she turned to gaze straight into her husband’s eyes), all I do want, for the very first time in my life, is what I already have.

Well (she went on after a long reflective pause), there was just enough left of his aunt’s legacy for Henry to buy Butterworth’s practice and, seven years ago, we settled down here and eventually gathered a little set of friends around us – Roger and Mary, the Vicar and his wife, Mr Withers, our local librarian, Miss Read the postmistress, and a handful of others.

Ours is a dull existence, I suppose, but we don’t mind – well, not much. To be honest, we’ve had all the fun and excitement we’ll ever demand of this world. Beyond a certain age, that phrase that people toss about so casually, ‘a waste of time’, well, it starts to acquire a real meaning, doesn’t it, a real weight. You realise you’ve been wasting something you’re fated to have less and less of. You’ve been dipping into your capital. You forget you’ve got a leasehold on life, not a freehold.

She sat for a moment without speaking, without even lighting up one of her Player’s, before continuing:

Then abruptly, on Christmas Eve, with Ray Gentry’s arrival at ffolkes Manor, our past was dragged out of the closet that we’d hoped it had been consigned to for ever. You’ve read those notes, Chief-Inspector. So I leave you to imagine just how he set about torturing us both. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

Trubshawe, who had said next to nothing during their linked testimony, now took a quiet moment to thank them both. Then he asked Henry Rolfe:

‘Dr Rolfe, did you kill Raymond Gentry?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ replied the Doctor, adding, ‘Don’t you see, Trubshawe, I had no cause to.’

‘No cause, you say?’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘What about jealousy?’

‘Jealousy? I tell you, there was no reason for me to be jealous of Gentry. After all, his role in the affair was only that of go-between. When Madge told me about the necessity of a – of an operation, she never once mentioned his name and I always assumed, until just five minutes ago, that her blackmailer had been Pavesco himself. Him I might well have wanted to murder, but he disappeared from circulation almost at once, probably after splitting up the spoils with Gentry. Last thing we heard, he’d been sighted in Anacapri in the company of a flashy South American Jewess.

‘So, as I say, I had absolutely no knowledge of Raymond Gentry’s existence until he drove down here with Selina and Don.’

‘Well, thank you again for your testimony.’

The Chief-Inspector now turned to Madge Rolfe.

‘Mrs Rolfe, I know I’ve already given you, along with the other ladies, a chance to answer this question, but I’ll ask it once more if you don’t mind. Was it you who quarrelled with Gentry in the attic?’

‘No, it wasn’t. There was nothing I had to say to him, either in public or in private.’

‘Did you murder him?’

‘No again. And shall I tell you why you ought to believe me?’

‘Yes, indeed, why don’t you?’

‘Because if I
had
murdered Gentry I wouldn’t have shot him. I wouldn’t have stabbed him. I wouldn’t have poisoned him. I’d have done it – had God given me the strength – I’d have done it with my own two bare hands. I wouldn’t have wanted
anything
– not a gun, not a knife, not a drop of cyanide, not even a piece of string – I wouldn’t have wanted anything, do you hear, to come between me and the pain I inflicted on the rat!’

It was only when she’d finished speaking that everyone realised Selina ffolkes had been standing on the threshold of the library during the whole of her tirade.

For a moment the atmosphere was just too electric for anyone to react.

Then Mary ffolkes hurriedly rose from her chair and, followed by Don and the Colonel, rushed over to the door.

‘Oh, my darling Selina!’ she cried, sweeping her daughter up in her arms and asking so many anxiously commiserative questions at once it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘You really feel you should have got up so soon?’ and ‘You’ve had a dreadful,
dreadful
shock, you know – would you like me to have Mrs Varley prepare you a cold compress or a nice cup of camomile tea?’

To all of which Selina offered a series of unexpectedly self-controlled responses, whether it was ‘Yes, Mummy, I’m quite all right’ or ‘Yes, yes, I’m all recovered now’ or ‘No thank you, Mummy, I really don’t need a cold compress. Or a cup of camomile tea.’

Don also fussed and fretted around her, cooing, ‘You
poor kid! Oh, you poor, poor kid!’ over and over again. But even if his hand ached to establish a consoling contact with her shoulder or tenderly disentangle a stray wisp of hair from one of her pale cheeks, it was again noticeable that it continued to hover a few inches from her without ever daring to settle.

In the meantime, making sympathetic tut-tutting noises with his tongue, the Colonel helped shepherd her into the library under the watchful eyes of his guests. Giving up his own chair for her to sit on, he asked:

‘Is there anything
I
can get you?’

‘No thank you, Daddy, I have everything I need.’

She slowly ran her eyes around the room.

‘But … but what’s going on?’

‘Ah, yes …’ replied the Colonel. ‘It’s true, something
has
been going on here. I want you to listen very carefully, my love. We have a policeman among us – don’t you remember, it was Chitty who came up with the suggestion – and, well, here he is, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe from Scotland Yard.’

‘Miss Selina,’ said Trubshawe with an avuncular nod of his head.

Appearing to display little surprise at his presence, Selina acknowledged it with a wan smile.

‘The Chief-Inspector,’ explained her father, ‘lives quite near us – close to the level-crossing – and he very kindly agreed to come here – it was Rolfe and your friend Don,
you know, who went and fetched him – and he agreed to come over and see what could be done about this horrible situation.’

‘I understand,’ said Selina composedly.

‘The thing is, he’s been asking us all about what we know of – the murder. It’s completely off-the-record, you understand, just till the storm passes and the police – I mean, the official police – get here. But we’ve all been taking turns at answering his questions and,’ he concluded, ‘well, if you still don’t feel up to it, I’m sure he’d –’

‘No, no,’ Selina gently interrupted him, ‘I really am quite well.’

Her blonde curls rolling over her unlined forehead like the crest of a wave about to unfurl itself on a virgin beach, she actually now produced a proper smile, sweet and dimply, one that almost made you forget how curiously devoid of emotion were her clear, china-blue eyes, eyes no longer blemished by the copious tears they had doubtless been shedding. Wearing a green cashmere jumper and a foulard dress that might have been labelled ‘country practical’ if it didn’t so perfectly fit her own perfect figure, she was as pretty as the proverbial picture.

‘You see,’ she explained, ‘I haven’t just been resting, I’ve been thinking. Thinking about everything I’ve seen and heard here in the past two days. Not just Raymond’s – Raymond’s death, but everything that led up to it. It’s been ever so long since I’ve had time to think for myself, to think
about
myself, about my friends and my family and even’ – she captured all of the ffolkeses’ guests in her limpid gaze – ‘even my family’s friends. And I see things very differently now.

‘So, Mr Trubshawe, if you wish to question me, I’m ready. And I promise I won’t break down or anything silly like that. I’ve done all the weeping I intend to do.’

‘Oh, gee, Selina, you’re swell!’ cried Don, adoration radiating from his eyes. ‘You just don’t know how I’ve – how we’ve all been missing you! Really missing you!’

This effusion, for some inexplicable reason, provoked an outburst from Evadne Mount so resoundingly loud it caused the whole company to jump.

‘Great Gods!’ she bellowed. ‘I’ve been blind as a bat! Of course! That’s it!’

Everybody, Selina included, turned to stare at her, causing the novelist to blush furiously.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry! What I meant was,’ she started to mumble, visibly struggling to find a plausible excuse for her extraordinary interjection, ‘what I meant was, yes, naturally, we’ve all been missing you! Yes, indeedy!’

A few more seconds elapsed in silence, for this was exceptionally odd behaviour even from somebody as eccentric as the novelist was universally deemed to be. Then Trubshawe turned towards Selina.

‘Well, Miss,’ he declared, ‘I can’t deny it would be extremely helpful to me if you did agree to answer my
questions. But, really, your father’s right. If you still feel shaky, understandably so under the circumstances, it can all be postponed until the local police arrive.’

‘No, no,’ insisted Selina. ‘I rather think I do want to talk about it. What I wouldn’t mind, though, is a cigarette.’

Madge Rolfe leaned forward to proffer her packet of Player’s, while Don, a non-smoker, did his own bit by grabbing off the Colonel’s desk a bulbous silver cigarette-lighter in the shape of Aladdin’s lamp and holding it up expectantly to Selina’s lips.

She took one of Madge’s cigarettes, gracefully accepted a light from Don and faced the Chief-Inspector.

‘What exactly is it you want to know?’

‘Well now,’ he began diffidently, ‘I gather you got here late on Christmas Eve in the company of Mr Duckworth and the victim, Raymond Gentry?’

‘That’s right. I was originally due to take the train down with Don alone. Then Ray, who has a car’ – she calmly corrected herself – ‘who
had
a car, a Hispano-Suiza, happened to say to me he thought it might be amusing for once to experience an old-fashioned family Christmas in the country and suggested driving us both down.’

‘He hadn’t been invited?’

‘No – but, you see, that was Ray. If he got an idea in his head, he wasn’t going to let himself be stopped from carrying it out by what he would call petty-bourgeois propriety. You know, what’s done and what’s not done.’

‘And despite the fact that your parents hadn’t invited him and weren’t expecting him, you saw no reason to demur?’

For the first time since she had entered the library, Selina looked a little ill-at-ease.

‘It was just Ray’s style. He had rather a commanding personality, you know, and he always seemed to end up getting his own way. He’d make you feel dreadfully strait-laced if you raised any objection to one of his madcap schemes.’

‘So you were quite relaxed about his coming down here unannounced?’

‘No, I can’t honestly say I was. I
am
a little strait-laced, you know – I still am – and, as a matter of fact, I did propose first telephoning Mummy and Daddy. But Ray said that giving them advance warning would only spoil the surprise of it all and that it’d be lots more fun if he were simply to turn up.’

‘And how did Don feel about that?’

Selina sneaked a guilty glance at the young American.

‘Oh well, as you can imagine, he was just a teensy bit put out. He
had
been properly invited and – well, you know, two’s company, three’s a crowd, and all that.’

‘But that didn’t bother you either?’ Trubshawe put to her.

Selina abruptly drew back and, by the time she was ready to reply, her lips had closed in a thin line.

‘Yes it did. I told you, Chief-Inspector, I don’t mind you questioning me, but I do mind you putting words in my
mouth. I’ve already admitted I was bothered by Ray coming down here uninvited and I was also concerned for Don’s feelings. He’s somebody I’m very, very fond of’ – that repeated ‘very’, as nobody could fail to notice, caused a scarlet-faced Don to gaze at her in even more than his usual rapture – ‘but, as I say, Ray had a very strong character and if he wanted something he generally got it. Anybody who knows him – who
knew
him – will tell you the same thing.’

‘Miss ffolkes,’ Trubshawe then asked, ‘how long did
you
know Raymond Gentry?’

Selina reflected for a moment or two.

‘Oh, just a few weeks. I met him at the Kafka Klub.’

The Chief-Inspector’s eyebrows uplifted.

‘Sorry – you met him where?’

‘The Kafka Klub. You don’t know it? It’s in the King’s Road in Chelsea. It’s
the
hang-out for all the fashionable young writers and artists.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, Ray and I were introduced to each other at the Kafka and we got to talking about Art and Life and Philosophy and the Sex Drive and he knew everything and everybody and he wrote free verse and he understood the symbolism of Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and he told me he was one of only seven people in the whole of England who’d read
The Communist Manifesto
in the original Russian. And, you see, I was nothing but a timid little
dormouse from Dartmoor and I’d never met anybody like him before and, well, do you wonder I was swept off my feet?’

‘N-o-o,’ replied Trubshawe, ‘I don’t suppose I do. But, you know, Miss, I can’t pretend to be as familiar as the late Mr Gentry apparently was with the likes of – of those two foreign fellows you just mentioned – but even I, dull old Inspector Plodder,’ he said, a steely ring insidiously entering his voice, ‘even I know enough to know that Karl Marx was German not Russian and consequently wrote
The
Communist Manifesto
not in Russian but in German. That’s just by-the-by, of course.’

Selina ffolkes blinked like a frightened faun.

‘And while we’re about it, darling,’ Cora Rutherford muttered under her breath, ‘did you never stop to think that his verse was free because he couldn’t find anyone to pay for it?’

Now Selina seemed so close to tears the actress at once took pity on her.

‘Sorry to be such a cat, my sweet,’ she said. ‘Just couldn’t help myself.’

‘Look, Miss,’ Trubshawe said, ‘I fancy what Miss Rutherford here and I were trying to do in our clumsy ways was demonstrate that Raymond Gentry wasn’t really worthy of somebody like you. Not a very nice person, now, was he?’

‘No,’ cried Selina, her eyes suddenly ablaze, ‘no, maybe he wasn’t! But he was alive, don’t you see, he was clever
and he was fun and he widened my horizons! Oh, I realise how silly and childish it must sound to you but, compared to Ray’s world, everything in my own life seemed so shrivelled and dried up! Before I met him, all I’d ever known was this house and the village and the countryside around it. Well, I wanted something better out of life! I told myself I was free, white and twenty-one and I wanted everything that was going in this crazy world – furs and fine wines and wild, extravagant parties! And I didn’t want it some day – I wanted it now! Was that so very wrong of me?’

Her voice dropped an octave.

‘No, don’t answer, anybody,’ she said contritely. ‘It
was
wrong, I know. Now I know.’

‘How,’ enquired Trubshawe softly, ‘do you know?’

Selina stubbed out her cigarette, on which she had taken no more than a couple of jerky puffs.

‘Mr Trubshawe, if you’ve been questioning my family and their friends, then you must already have been told how intolerably rude and disrespectful Ray was to all of them from the moment we arrived. I watched him with mounting horror – watched how he couldn’t resist needling them and making them squirm. It was as though it was in his blood. What I had remembered as so gay and amusing and penetrating in the Kafka Klub now struck me as just stupidly arrogant and cruel.

‘That was one of his pet words, you know, “penetrating”. I used to think it was priceless the way he used it about
everything. Down here, though, I realised for the first time what a hollow, shallow, meaningless word it was, the sort of word only a know-all like Ray would ever dream of using, a word whose sole purpose was to make other people feel small. Every time I heard him – here, here in this house, in my home, in front of my parents and their friends,
my
friends, my
true
friends – every time I heard him describe somebody or something as penetrating I wanted to scream!

‘I was seeing him as he really was and I couldn’t wait for Christmas to be all over so he’d drive back to Town, alone this time, and I’d never have to set eyes – or ears – on him again!’

She turned towards her parents, who had been listening avidly to her.

‘It’s true – Mummy – Daddy. I am so terribly, terribly sorry for what I’ve put you through, but I swear that even before – before what happened to him, I’d made up my mind to break things off. Before it went further … before it went too far …’

‘Oh, Selina, my darling,’ cried Mary ffolkes, giving her a smothering hug, ‘I just knew you’d eventually see what an awful person he was!’

‘I did. But it was Don who really showed me what Ray was worth.’

‘Don?’ echoed the Chief-Inspector. ‘What did he have to do with it?’

‘Well, as I told you, Don was unhappy from the very beginning, from the drive down here, with Raymond taking over all the arrangements as he did, and I could see him silently suffering Ray’s presence and just dying to give him what-for. Then when Ray, who got disgustingly drunk – that’s another side of him I used to find charming, if you can believe it – when Ray began needling even me, about my piano-playing, Don leapt up and actually threatened –’

Intuitively divining Trubshawe’s reaction to that last word, Selina abruptly clammed up.

‘I – I don’t mean –’ she finally began to stammer. ‘It’s just that, compared to Ray, Don was – you know – he was so – so virile – so …’

The Chief-Inspector doggedly pursued his advantage.

‘What did Don threaten to do to Raymond Gentry?’ he almost barked at her.