Authors: Susan Howatch
By this time Mrs. Welbeck was scarlet, Lady Todd-Marshall was purple and all the men except Lewis were holding their breath as tenaciously as if they were battling with hiccups.
“I don’t need to do a survey, darling—I just
know
,” said Mrs. Hoffenberg dogmatically. “I was married to a clergyman and—did I ever tell you that I was married to a clergyman?”
“Several times, yes.”
“Well, let me tell you, sweetie, that it wasn’t just his wrists that were limp … Hey, pass that decanter back—I can’t think why you had to go and swipe it like that!”
“I’m so sorry, how thoughtless of me,” said Lewis at once, and poured the remaining claret into his glass before handing her back the empty decanter.
“Why, you absolute swine, you’ve nicked the lot!”
“Dear me, so I have! Well, I did tell you I could never resist a St. Estèphe—”
“Pig!”
“Venetia,” said Lady Cynthia, “do shut up—there’ll be port later
with the cheese, I promise … Alice, you can take the beef out now.”
I forced my feet to remove me to the kitchen.
When I returned, summoned by the buzzer to clear the plates after the men had finished their second helpings, Mrs. Hoffenberg was sulking in silence and the conversation had turned to Mrs. Thatcher’s recent prophecy that there would be a golden age stretching far into the 1990s; Mr. Welbeck was saying what a wonderful thing it was that now even the middle-classes had the chance to become members of Lloyd’s and live in affluence ever after, although Lady Todd-Marshall retorted that it was no use wallowing in affluence if everyone died of AIDS or got murdered by psychopaths, and what about that pregnant woman who got murdered on the motorway. But the men weren’t interested in pregnant women getting murdered on motorways, and after murmuring soothingly how keen the government was on law and order they began to drool again over Mrs. Thatcher and her special relationship with Walter P.W.III’s friend Ronnie.
In disappointment I retired to the kitchen and loaded a tray with the summer pudding, the cream and the cold custard. The Stilton was already on the dining-room sideboard, the pong kept in check by a covered dish.
When Mrs. Hoffenberg saw the summer pudding she said in disgust: “Oh God, it’s all puddings today, isn’t it—first Yorkshire and now this! Well, I’m going to give the food a miss from now on—where’s the bloody port?”
“Venetia,” said Lady Cynthia, furious by this time, “you’re not exactly a credit to whoever taught you manners in the nursery, are you?”
“I’m not a credit to bloody anyone. Well, if you’re not going to produce the port for another ten minutes, I’ll have a brandy to keep me going—and make it a double!”
“The port’s on the sideboard. Help yourself. And I hope you’ll now stop talking about drink,” said Lady Cynthia in a trembling voice. I knew instinctively that all her most painful memories of her alcoholic husband were being awakened, and I was sure Lewis knew that too for at once he leaned forward and said: “Cynthia, will you please excuse me if I too skip the pudding?” Then without waiting for a reply he added to Mrs. Hoffenberg: “The rain seems to have stopped. Let’s take our glasses of port and inspect the garden.”
“At last!” shouted Mrs. Hoffenberg. “A clergyman with initiative! A clergyman with pizzazz! A clergyman with—”
“Quite so,” said Lewis before she could complete a word which apparently began with a “b.” “Be sure you make a note of me in that survey of yours.” Limping to the sideboard he poured a dash of port into a glass and tried to hand it to her but she waved it away. “I’m having a minimum of eight ounces,” she declared. “It’s the least I deserve after that rotten claret and ghastly meal.” And pouring the contents of her water-glass into the flower arrangement, she grabbed the port decanter and filled the tumbler to the brim.
“Disgusting!” muttered Mrs. Welbeck, the teetotaller.
I whispered to my employer, who had faltered in dishing out the summer pudding: “Shall I do that for you?” but Lady Cynthia managed to say: “No, that’s all right, Alice. Take around the custard and cream.”
The French windows which led onto the balcony opened and closed as Lewis and Mrs. Hoffenberg withdrew, passing out of sight as they descended the flight of steps to the patio. A deathly silence began as everyone waited for me to finish my task and vanish, but as soon as I left the room temptation overwhelmed me; recklessly I pressed my ear to the panels of the closed door, but there was no difficulty hearing the explosion of outrage which followed.
Mrs. Hoffenberg was described by Mr. Welbeck as having “hit a new low” by exhibiting such “rock-bottom behaviour.” Mrs. Welbeck said it was always far more repulsive to see a woman drunk than a man drunk. (Why? She never deigned to explain.) Lady Todd-Marshall suggested darkly that Mrs. Hoffenberg was ripe to appear before the bench on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. Lord Todd-Marshall made the middle-class remark that Mrs. Hoffenberg’s performance constituted the sort of behaviour which drove people to talk about the “decadent aristocracy”—although of course, he added hastily as he remembered his hostess, he well knew that the majority of the aristocracy led thoroughly decent lives. Everyone, in other words, rushed to judgement. It was left to Lady Cynthia, the person most wronged by Mrs. Hoffenberg’s old-soak act, to set her anger aside and say: “It’s all very sad. She’s obviously terribly unhappy. It’s easy to criticise her, isn’t it, but so hard to offer constructive help.” I admired Lady Cynthia very much when she said that, and I was sure Nicholas would have admired her too.
I slunk away and started preparing the coffee.
Lady Cynthia hurried into the kitchen just as I was putting the demitasses on the tray. “Alice,” she said without any preliminary
chit-chat, “Lewis is going to take Venetia home now, but he wants a woman to go with him in case Venetia … well, in case she needs help there which it wouldn’t be appropriate for a priest to provide. Would you—could you—”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “The coffee’s almost ready. Shall I—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll see to it. Thank you so much, my dear—oh, and don’t take to heart anything beastly which Venetia said about that wonderful meal. Everyone else agreed it was a tour de force.”
Nice, kind, thoughtful, generous Lady Cynthia. I hoped more fiercely than ever that Walter P.W.III would somehow restrain himself from sweeping her off to America. Removing my apron I grabbed a piece of roast beef to sustain me and hurried downstairs to fetch a cardigan.
By the time I returned to the hall the front door was open, Lewis’s red Volkswagen was outside in the street with the engine running and Lewis himself was busy stuffing Mrs. Hoffenberg into the front seat while Lady Cynthia hovered anxiously nearby. Turning to me she said in a low voice: “This is so good of you, Alice,” but in fact, as I well knew, it wasn’t good of me at all; I was motivated not by virtue but by an enthralled desire to witness Life with a capital L. Walled off by my weight, isolated by feelings of inferiority and entombed for years with a maiden aunt, I’d become all too accustomed to life passing me by. Yet here I now was, about to chaperone a clergyman, tend a decadent aristocrat and roar around London in a foreign car to the accompaniment of squealing wheels. I was having a hard time concealing my ecstasy.
After I had wedged myself into the back seat we set off.
Mrs. Hoffenberg, astonishingly, was still conscious but by this time very woozy, and as we drove up Eaton Terrace she began to sing snatches of a countryish sort of song which I didn’t recognise. Snatches of the lyric floated towards me along with a pronounced aroma of port. Her voice, raspy and torchy, reminded me of the nightclubs glimpsed in television dramas, low dives which the police inevitably raided for drugs.
The song seemed to be about the pain caused to the singer by a heartbreaker, a dream-maker, a lover who kept playing with fire. However the singer had now found someone else who would take the heartbreaker’s place—fill the empty space—with the result that the singer’s heart wouldn’t be broken any more.
I was just wondering if she intended to sing this little number over
and over again for the remainder of the journey when she suddenly abandoned the lyric and said with surprising clarity to Lewis: “That’s an early Elvis song. Do you like Elvis?”
“I’m too old.”
“Oh, don’t be so stuffy! I bet
you
were a heartbreaker when you were young!”
“Any self-centred fool can break hearts. Nowadays I get my kicks out of mending them.”
“Honestly? You mend hearts?”
“Mend hearts, refurbish souls, heal wounds old and new—”
“In that case, tell me this: do you think the best way to cure a broken heart is by ‘filling the empty space,’ as the song puts it, and having it off with someone new?”
“That’s like giving a drink to someone with a hang-over. It may alleviate the pain for a while but it doesn’t fix the problem which drove you to drink in the first place.”
“Damn it, I’m not talking about bloody drink, I’m talking about bloody sex! Do you screw around?”
“No, I don’t believe in exploiting people. I follow an alternative life-style.”
“But darling, I yearn to be exploited by you! Send the slave back to Cynthia’s in a taxi and swap to my life-style for the rest of the afternoon!”
“You’d be extremely disappointed. My arthritic hip’s playing me up today.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Why don’t you get a new one?”
“No time. I’m too busy mending hearts broken by your kind of life-style.”
“Very slick!” said Mrs. Hoffenberg crossly, but added with grudging admiration: “You’re pretty damned weird but I like you anyway.” And closing her eyes abruptly she began to snore.
“Are you all right, Alice?” said Lewis at last.
I assured him I was.
“We’re nearly there.”
Situated in a quiet Chelsea backwater the house was strikingly pretty, its front walls swathed in ivy, the flowerbeds beneath the windows ablaze with scarlet roses, but inside the place was a mess. Beyond the chaotic living-room, strewn with sections of the Sunday papers, the kitchen was littered with unwashed glasses, and flies were fastened to plates of unfinished food.
“Bloody hell!” muttered Mrs. Hoffenberg, who had woken up sufficiently to be steered into the house. Collapsing onto the sofa she stared around aggrieved. “What a tip! Never mind, the maid comes tomorrow and meanwhile I’ll blot out the whole scene with a swig of VC. Get it for me, would you?” she added imperiously to me. “There’s a bottle in the fridge.”
“What’s VC?” demanded Lewis.
“Veuve Clicquot, you idiot! What else?”
“Alice, would you please get Mrs. Hoffenberg a glass of water?”
“I don’t want fucking water! I want—”
“Forget it. I’m not prepared to stand by and see you abuse yourself any further. I draw the line.”
“Why, you miserable, mean, beastly, brutish old bastard—”
“Right. That’s me. You’ve finally got my measure. Now lay off the booze, lie down on that sofa and pass out.”
“But I might choke on my own vomit—I might wind up a corpse!”
“I’ll make sure you’re wedged in a safe position. Alice”—he stopped me at the door before I could fetch the glass of water—“come here for a moment, please, and stand beside me. Now Venetia, look hard at Alice. You’re going to remember her. You’re going to remember that she was here and you’re going to remember that you and I didn’t drink champagne—or do anything else. And last but not least you’re going to remember my alternative life-style, you’re going to remember I work at St. Benet’s with Nicholas Darrow, you’re going to remember that I’ll always be willing to help you there if ever you decide to get your heart fixed.”
But Mrs. Hoffenberg was no longer listening. She was sliding from the sofa to the floor, and a second later she was lying unconscious amidst the mess and the filth and the trash.
II
“Go upstairs
, Alice,” said Lewis abruptly, “find her bedroom and bring down the pillows and the duvet—or if there’s no duvet bring at least two blankets. I’m sorry, I’d do it myself but my hip’s so bad now I doubt if I could get up the stairs.”
I did as I was told while he cleared the sofa of junk. Eventually we hauled the body up from the floor, dumped it on the cushions and swaddled it with the duvet. The pillows we used to wedge her in a non-lethal position. I was just adding the final touch by removing her
shoes and tucking her feet out of sight again when Lewis said: “Let’s take an extra five minutes to make this place less sordid. If I woke with a hang-over and saw such chaos I’d immediately want to hit the bottle again.”
Our labours moved into a new phase. I loaded the dishwasher, threw out all the left-over food and wiped the kitchen counters. Lewis stacked the newspapers into a pile, emptied the overflowing ashtrays and found a Hoover which I used to remove the debris from the carpet. He also found two empty bottles of VC, one lying on the floor in a corner and the other standing forgotten on the window-sill.
As I switched off the Hoover I saw he was taking a closer look at the body. “Alice, what are these diamond hatpins doing in her hair? Is this a wig which she’s skewered into position?”
“Wigs are never grey at the roots.”
“True. Well, the hatpins are decorative but they could also be dangerous if they work loose. Can you take them out?”
I detached them gently but the mound of hair at once collapsed, resembling a birds’ nest which had been vandalised. At Lewis’s suggestion I then brought the water which he had asked me to fetch earlier, and he slipped one of his cards beneath the glass as I set it on the coffee-table. The inscription was still plainly legible. “The Reverend Lewis Hall, The Healing Centre, St. Benet’s-by-the-Wall, Egg Street, London EC2 …” I stared, remembering how he had left his card with me at my home in Dean Danvers Street, and suddenly I had an impression of a pattern, an enigmatic, repeating signal from a source which was somehow both close at hand yet far away.
I looked up to find Lewis watching me with his sharp, shrewd black eyes. “You did well,” he said. “I can see now you’re efficient as well as sensible. You don’t panic, you’re too intelligent to ask unnecessary questions—and on top of all that, you cook like a dream! I shan’t forget your help today, Alice. Thank you.”