VI
As we approached the Oakshott exit of the A3, I finally nerved myself to say: “I suppose Mrs. Mayfield hasn’t been in touch?”
“No, it’s clear she’s dumped me. And the group hasn’t been in touch either. All that’s completely finished as far as I’m concerned,” he said, and when I was silent he added with a passionate sincerity: “You’ve got to believe that, Carter, because I swear it’s the truth!”
“How could I not believe you after all you’ve told me about your talks with Lewis?” I said at once. “Of course I believe you!”
But did I?
We reached the Oakshott exit and he swung the car off towards the woods.
VII
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Kim as he turned the car into the drive of that horrible house which I could now clearly see was built in the handsome style of a between-the-wars architect; with dread I realised that on this second visit I was going to take in far more details, thus ensuring the place was more firmly etched than ever in my memory. I was now noticing the immaculate garden. The front lawn, smooth as green baize, appeared to be weedless. All the borders were bursting with blooms. Even the sinister trees looked as if they harboured nothing more harmless on this occasion than squirrels—and the squirrels would be the red kind, the nice-natured, shy-mannered little tree-rats which always looked so cuddly in those classic storybooks for pre-schoolers.
“I made sure the gardener was kept on after Sophie’s death,” Kim was saying. “Gardens quickly go to pieces if they’re not looked after.”
I managed to rouse myself sufficiently to say: “Probate can’t have been granted yet—did the lawyers raise any objection when you said you wanted to stay here for a while?”
“Are you kidding? They couldn’t wait for me to move in and protect the place from burglars and vandals! Sophie’s brother objected at first— he’s inherited the contents of the house—but he was quick to see the argument for having the house occupied . . . Now, come along inside”— he halted the car on the gravel sweep in front of the main entrance— “and let’s set those traumatic memories to rest once and for all. The cleaning woman gave notice, but Mary organised a firm to do a make-over only the other day so everything should be looking good . . .”
I slowly emerged from the car. Despite the fact that I knew there were other houses nearby I could not see them; I felt as if I were marooned miles from anywhere.
Kim was opening the front door, moving forward swiftly to turn off the alarm. “Okay, first things first!” I heard him say cheerfully. “Let’s find that bottle of champagne!”
With enormous reluctance I followed him into the circular hall and saw again the long curve of the staircase as it snaked up to the gallery of the floor above. The sheer luxury of all that chandelier-crowned wasted space reminded me not only of the money Kim had made in the past but of the mystery attached to the money he claimed to have lost. I might have dwelled on this thought for longer but suddenly I was so busy trying to avoid looking at the spot where Sophie’s corpse had lain that no coherent thinking was possible at all.
“Want to use the cloakroom?”
“What? Oh . . . yes . . . but I know where it is,” I said, and immediately found myself reliving the moment when I had vomited into the lavatory on the night Sophie had died. I began to veer towards the cloakroom door but stopped when I realised that I had no desire to relieve myself and no desire to let him out of my sight. I found I had to be sure there was no tampering with the champagne, and although I knew this reaction was paranoid I found I was quite unable to eliminate it.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said, following him towards the kitchen. “I’m all right at the moment.”
“Me too. No, wait a moment, I’ll be handling food so I ought to wash my hands. Funny how hygienic one becomes in hospital! Have a seat at the table here, sweetheart—I’ll be right back.”
I waited until I heard the cloakroom door close across the hall and then my paranoia ensured that I slipped after him to listen to his activities, but only normal, water-sloshing sounds reached me. Speeding back to the kitchen, my heart thudding uncomfortably, I was sitting at the table by the time he returned.
“Look at that—Sophie’s gardening clobber’s still here!” he murmured in irritation as he moved towards the refrigerator, and following his glance I saw again the flat wooden basket, now containing not only the gloves and secateurs but the straw hat, draped over one edge. The contract cleaners, evidently wanting to leave the table uncluttered, had fought shy of removing the hat and basket from the scene but had dumped the gear on the floor behind the back door.
“I’m sorry,” Kim was saying rapidly as he saw the expression on my face, “I should have made sure that such an obvious reminder of that traumatic night was well out of sight, but I’m afraid I forgot. Well, let’s face it, I probably chose to forget because whenever I think of that night my head starts to ache. In fact I feel as if I might have a headache coming on right now, but I’m sure it’ll go away when I’ve knocked back some champagne . . . Did Lewis tell you about my headaches?”
“No.”
“First of all I thought Mrs. Mayfield was causing them long-distance, but when I said that to my doctors they just thought I was round the twist—I mean, even more round the twist than I was already—so I shut up. They did do tests, just to make sure there was no brain tumour, but when nothing showed up they wrote the headaches off as a stress symptom.”
“But why should you think Mrs. Mayfield was being malign towards you?”
“I wondered if she’d come to the conclusion that I was now more of a liability than an asset . . . But let’s forget all that for the moment and enjoy our treat. Ah yes, here they are—smoked salmon sandwiches, made by Mary first thing this morning and dropped off here along with the vintage Moët! Shall we take it all into the living-room?”
The curtains had been closed in the living-room when I had seen it before, and I was struck now by how light it was in the heat of the day, its long windows facing a terrace beyond which another shaven lawn lay shimmering in the sun. Glossy chintzes in autumnal colours covered the sofas and chairs, and the carpet was the colour of those exotic mushrooms which gourmet food departments sell at rip-off prices. The whole room reeked of the stultifying good taste which the southern English have spent generations cultivating. Even the oil paintings depicted scenes guaranteed not to give offence, and I suspected that these yawn-inducing heirlooms had been inherited by Sophie; Kim’s interest in modern art was nowhere in evidence. A multitude of other valuable knick-knacks, ranging from the antique clock to the pair of silver fruit-baskets, also whispered “CLASS” with sibilants which hissed. I decided I loathed the house more than ever.
“It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” said Kim, after filling both our glasses and replacing the champagne bottle in the ice-bucket. “I’ll open the French windows.”
“Maybe we could sit on the terrace?” Despite all the windows I was finding the room increasingly claustrophobic.
“We could,” he agreed, “but I think it would be too hot for comfort. It’ll be all right in here once we get some air circulating.”
Once the French windows were open I did feel better; at least if things went wrong I had unimpeded access to an escape route. However, Kim seemed to be having no difficulty in sustaining his role of friendly host, and there was no hint that the scene might take a disastrous turn. I decided that although anxiety was excusable fear was unjustified; firmly I told myself I had to stop being so neurotic.
“Sandwich?”
“Thanks.” I took one and looked at it. I even nibbled a corner of the brown bread before putting the sandwich on my plate and reaching for my glass of champagne. “Here’s to us both,” I said. “May we each make a full recovery from the hell of the last few weeks.”
“I’ll second that!” he said fervently, and we drank. When we came up for air we both sighed, and as we laughed at our identical reaction I felt for the first time that the Kim I had loved was still there, still alive beneath all the wreckage. I was even tempted to write off my attraction to Tucker as an infatuation born of stress.
“You’re already looking quite recovered!” Kim was saying, smiling at me. “I like that outfit . . . but why are you wearing a cross?”
I was startled but said simply: “Lewis gave it to me.”
“Ah . . . Did anyone at that place try to convert you?”
“No. Why?”
“I wondered if, after all that flirting with the enemy, the enemy had tried flirting back.”
“They cared for me even though I was a stranger. They were committed to truth when I was drowning in lies. They gave me hope even though I wanted to despair. If that’s flirting there ought to be more of it around.”
He smiled at me again. “After being befriended by Lewis I assure you I feel the same way . . . And talking of Lewis and his fondness for the ‘unvarnished truth’—”
“Is this where we embark on a Cluedo-style exercise to find out who did what to whom in the library?”
“Well, at least there’s no library.”
We failed to laugh this time; the tension was now too great, and as I abandoned all thought of eating I started steadily sipping champagne.
VIII
“I’ll start at the beginning,” said Kim, “and confirm that I was born in Cologne and that my father was a Nazi lawyer, but although he sent a lot of men to their deaths he wouldn’t have wound up at Nuremberg. The men he condemned were all German soldiers who’d got into trouble. He was a judge who wound up presiding at courts martial.”
“You mean he didn’t know Hans Frank at all?”
“He knew Frank but he didn’t work for him in Krakow. What happened was this: at the beginning of the war my father was working in the
Volksgerichtshof
, known as the VGH, which was the highest Nazi court for political crimes—it was part of Germany’s normal legal system in that those who appeared before it were arrested and prosecuted in the normal way, but the trouble was Germany moved from being a constitutional state, based on the rule of law, to being a police state where oppression was the only means of ruling. So the VGH quickly became corrupted. There was no right of appeal, no trial by jury and certainly no impartiality, as the judges were committed Nazis. And the people lucky enough to be acquitted weren’t set free—they were just turned over to the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps.
“My father didn’t approve of this procedure because he disliked the fact that the police authority wasn’t put under the control of the law, and he thought the Gestapo should be subject to the judiciary. Well, there was no changing the system but he did manage to change his job. He wrote to Frank to ask for a helping hand and Frank arranged for him to go to Poland to do courts martial; the system required a professional judge to preside with two soldiers. However, I rather doubt if my father enjoyed this either since his function was to be disciplinary rather than judicial and a high number of executions had to be ordered . . . No wonder he took to drink after the war! I think he was just ploughed under by all those disastrous events which wrecked his career and destroyed the law as he knew it. Yes, he was a Nazi, and yes, he should have been able to foresee the mayhem, but it’s easy for us to say that with the wisdom of hindsight, isn’t it, and my father certainly wasn’t alone in failing to foresee the horrors when he joined the Nazi party in 1929 in pursuit of his dream of a better Germany . . . It’s strange, but since I’ve wound up ploughed under myself I find I have a good deal more sympathy for him—or so I said to my psychiatrist during one of our interminable sessions centred on my past.”
“But if your father wasn’t a war criminal—”
“We still took the rat-run to Argentina—that was all true—but it wasn’t because he needed to evade the prosecutors at Nuremberg. We went because my father couldn’t bear to stay in a wrecked Germany and he had the money and the contacts required to escape.”
“But in that case, why did you float the story that he was a war criminal?”
“I needed a plausible reason to explain why I could be blackmailed, and a criminal father hyped up the credibility factor.” He reached for another sandwich. “You’re not eating, sweetheart!”
“I’ll get to it in a minute. So you invented the blackmail story about that Jew who had been with you on the ship to Argentina—”
“Yes, that was all a fiction. I’ve never been blackmailed about my Nazi origins.”
“But you were blackmailed about something else.”
“I was, but as I felt I couldn’t tell you the truth I had to come up with an alternative explanation.”
“And you felt you had to disclose the blackmail to explain your lack of capital?”
“I did feel the need to explain that, but in fact what drove me on to invent an alternative explanation was that I was afraid Sophie would tell you the truth. I discussed the situation with Elizabeth—with Mrs. Mayfield—”
“Wait a moment. When I first asked you about Mrs. Mayfield, you said she was just someone you didn’t see any more.”
“I was certainly estranged from her—we’d quarrelled over my decision to marry you. But after Sophie succeeded in meeting you face to face I felt I just had to have Mrs. Mayfield’s help in controlling the situation and I called her the next day.”
“I’m surprised Mrs. Mayfield chose to help you! Why not simply let Sophie bust up our relationship?”
“For various reasons she didn’t want the true story about the blackmail coming out. I’ll get to that later. Anyway—”
“—anyway, you and Mayfield cooked up a plot to defuse Sophie if she tried to spill the beans. But weren’t you afraid right from the start that the beans would be spilled?”
“Yes, but there was more than one type of bean, wasn’t there? When Sophie first heard I planned to remarry she said you ought to know that I’d been unfaithful to her from the beginning and had even destroyed her chance of having children.
That
was the disclosure I was fearing in the run-up to the wedding.”
I began to understand. “You mean in the beginning you thought Sophie wouldn’t spill the blackmail beans?”
“I knew she wouldn’t. She’d told me she hadn’t been able to bring herself to discuss the subject of the blackmail with anyone, even that local clergyman of hers. She’d found the subject quite literally unspeakable.”
“So in that case—”
“—I was more than worried that she might succeed in spilling the infidelity beans, but I thought I could survive that; I thought that if the worst came to the worst I’d be able to convince you she was just out of her mind with jealousy. I also thought she’d back off after the wedding because she’d always claimed her aim was to prevent the marriage taking place. However, to my horror I found she couldn’t let the matter rest after all.”
Even before he had finished speaking I was remembering Sophie’s conversation with me in the supermarket. “She felt more strongly than ever, didn’t she,” I said, “that God wanted her to make a new effort to dish up the truth—and this time she was going to speak the unspeakable.”
All he said in reply was: “When she told you to ask me about Mrs. Mayfield, I knew the writing was on the wall.”
“And that was when you got together again with Mayfield. Was it she who came up with the next plan?”
“Yes, she thought it would be a better tactical move if I didn’t wait for Sophie to spill the blackmail beans but went ahead and pre-empted the true story with the fiction. She thought you’d be more likely to swallow the fiction if it appeared to be dragged out of me in the form of a confession, so she got Mandy Simmons to stage that phone call—”
“—and then afterwards you and Mayfield slogged away at the task of convincing me Sophie was certifiable.”
“Well, we had to destroy her credibility!”
“Sure.” I ran my tongue around my lips as if to soften them up for pronouncing the crucial sentence. “So why exactly,” I said, “were you being blackmailed?”
Finishing his glass of champagne he stood up and began to roam around the room. He could no longer look at me.
At last he said: “It was a sex-mess.” Halting by the window at the far end of the room he stood staring out over the tranquil garden. “Before I go any further,” I heard him say, “I want to make it clear that I’ve been very happy with you, and I don’t want to live now as I lived in the past.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I appreciate the compliment. But just how the hell did you live in the past?”
He returned to the ice-bucket on the coffee-table and poured himself another dose of champagne.