‘What absolute bastards.’
‘It’s the name of the game, Rex.’
‘Poor devil!’
‘Forever after he felt the disgrace of it.’
‘He would, of course.’
‘Naturally the last thing he wanted was to have all this painfully revived.’
‘Why didn’t he say? I would have understood. It is my field after all.’
‘They take an oath.’
‘Ah.’
‘So you see—’
‘Hang on. Jennings. Isn’t that an Irish name?’
‘I think he comes from—’
‘By Jiminy!’ And then a softly muttered soldier’s curse. ‘I believe we’re fingering the IRA here.’
‘I shouldn’t jump—’
‘We must ring the police.’ Briefly his attorney rested her head in her hands. ‘The Terrorist Squad. New Scotland Yard.’
Sue spent the next quarter of an hour dissuading Rex from immediate action before she felt it safe to transfer her attention to practical matters. These included bathing his face and hands and talking him into shaving. She made some fresh tea and drew up a short list of things he needed from the shop.
‘I’ll get them in the morning.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m going to switch the immersion on now. Promise me you’ll have a hot bath and a lovely long rest.’
Rex agreed and meant it, for combined exhaustion and unhappiness had left him feeling he could sleep forever.
‘In the morning you can put on some nice clean things and I’ll take these grotty ones for a whizz in my machine. Now.’ She leaned forward and kissed the deep ridges across his white, dry forehead. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?’
Rex just trapped a yawn and Montcalm, who had been sitting at his master’s feet throughout, smiled in the strange way that dogs have, stretching his blackish-grey top lip, wrinkling back his nostrils and slightly opening his mouth.
And it was on that positive note that Sue had left them. Sitting side by side in the dim, squalid little kitchen, not nearly so distraught as when she arrived but still, she feared, capable in an instant of tumbling back into remorseful sorrow.
Now, back in her own front room, Sue stopped biting her nails, sprang up from the sofa and started pacing about. She had to dream up a method of keeping them happy. And also find a way to stop Rex racing all around the village with tales of Republican mayhem.
Oh, it was all too much for one person to handle. She needed to share this new responsibility. Obtain assurance that she had done the right thing. Perhaps get some advice on what her best course of future action should be.
Then, stopping almost in mid-stride, it came to her. There was someone. Not a person with whom she was especially friendly or had anything in common with, but a member of the Circle nevertheless. And, as such, bound to be interested in Rex’s revelations.
Sue sat down again, pulled the phone on to her lap and dialled Laura’s number.
Laura was glad, after all, that she had gone into work. Several nice things had happened and, while before last Monday most would have barely registered, today, cumulatively, they had almost cheered her up. She had decided to treat these incidents as omens; small signposts indicating possible ways out of the morass of misery in which she was so helplessly floundering.
First, there were two cheques in the post. One, for over three thousand pounds, from a couple who had ignored all her previous letters and invoices and proved persistently evasive on the telephone. Laura had been finally compelled to threaten them with a summons.
Then Adrian McLaren, the man who had brought the linen cupboard over in his Land Rover, had asked her out for a drink. She had said no, naturally, but had recognised, even at the moment of refusal, a faint but surely healthy glimmer of satisfaction.
But best of all had been lunch. Laura had always had a friendly relationship with the owners of the Blackbird bookshop. They occasionally took in each other’s parcels and kept an eye generally if one or the other was absent. Every now and again Avery Phillips would ask Laura round for what he called ‘soup and bits’ and she always went, for he was a wonderful cook.
Today she had said she really didn’t feel up to it which was true, for by one o’clock the nearly imperceptible buzz given by the drinks invitation had worn off and she was feeling utterly dreary again. But Avery had insisted and she had had neither the will nor the energy to argue.
It was not as if, she told herself climbing the steep unvarnished stairs, she would have to make conversation. Avery always talked a blue streak, never waiting for a response or listening if one came.
The somewhat dusty room over the shop was mainly used for storage, over half the space being taken up by boxes and brown-paper parcels of books. Obsolete posters urgently hyping past bestsellers were stuck to the walls. One corner held a small sink and a Baby Belling. In the window bay a small, round table was beautifully laid for three. Stiff white cloth and napkins, plain but elegant wine glasses, bistro cutlery. A bottle of wine, Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon, was uncorked and breathing.
Tim Young, Avery’s partner, pulled out a chair for Laura and Avery served, on basic white china, thick curried parsnip soup with nan bread, tiny filo parcels of melting goat’s cheese and slices of raw, marinaded fennel. He poured the wine, and its fragrance mingled divinely with the spicy food.
Laura lifted a soup spoon to her lips, then put it down again. Directly facing her was a spectacularly gruesome poster. A yawning grave surrounded by rotting maggoty skulls was giving up its ghost in the form of a massive scaly creature with two heads, each of which held a huge molten eye. Inside these spitting furnaces many tiny creatures were being burnt to a frazzle.
‘I’m afraid . . .’ Laura averted her head and made a repulsed movement with her hand. Avery looked over his shoulder and immediately got up.
‘My dear, I’m so sorry.’ He bustled round to her side of the table and changed seats, grumbling to Tim as he sat down. ‘What were you thinking of?’
‘What I’m always thinking of,’ replied Tim. ‘My wild nights with Simon Callow.’
‘Take no notice,’ said Avery, resettling himself. ‘He’s never even met Simon Callow. I shall take that dreadful thing down after lunch.’
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ protested Tim. ‘I like it. It reminds me of your ex.’
Laura listened to them happily prattling on. At first she ate automatically, distracted by melancholy, but nobody could eat Avery’s food automatically for long. As her nose and taste buds became entranced by the soft but vibrant impact of the wine and the piquant, buttery soup, Laura’s attention was claimed completely.
When she next tuned into the conversation the talk was of VAT returns, the property market and the general bloody-mindedness of bank managers.
‘It’s not even as if it’s their money,’ complained Avery, very loudly.
‘Calm down,’ said Tim.
‘I’m perfectly calm!’
‘You’re shouting.’
‘I’m not shouting. Am I shouting, Laura? I mean, truly, am I?’
Laura, nibbling a fat Greek olive that smelled of coriander, did not reply. Now that the meal was almost over she felt the paralysis of loneliness starting to creep back. Isolated, unintentionally withdrawn, she drained her glass in one quick movement.
‘What is it, love?’ said Tim. ‘What’s the matter?’
She looked across at the lean, dark face intently regarding her. His eyes - unlike his partner’s, which were always inquisitive and glossy with excitement at the merest whiff of another’s sorrows - were grave and concerned. Perhaps it was this that made Laura answer honestly. Perhaps it was the wine.
‘Someone’s died. A friend.’
‘Oh, Laura.’ Tim reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘And here we were,’ said Avery, ‘blathering on.’ He refilled her glass. ‘Drink up, heart.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
To her surprise, for she had already talked about it to a degree that had left her quite wrung out, Laura found that she did. That previous outpouring to the chief inspector, such an anguished, angry flux, had left her sore and miserable. The whole process had been so untimely - provoked not by a need on her part to speak but by pressure from an impersonal inquisitor.
‘The man who died - he was killed actually - lived in our village.’
‘Not the one in the papers!’ gasped Avery. There was a sharp movement under the table. He winced and said, ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes. I loved him,’ said Laura simply. And after that it was easy. She started at the very beginning, when she had trodden on Gerald’s foot in the village store, and went on until the end, when she had kissed him goodnight (and, unwittingly, goodbye) on the last night of his life.
‘I always used to think,’ she concluded sadly, ‘that if you loved someone hard enough and for long enough eventually they wouldn’t be able to help loving you back. Very . . . very foolish . . .’
‘Oh darling, don’t take on.’ Avery produced a large silk Paisley square from his breast pocket and passed it over with a flourish. ‘Have a blotette.’ Laura blew her nose. ‘All due respects, but he must have been blind as a bat. Heavens - if I weren’t gay I’d spend my entire life panting through your letter box. Wouldn’t you, Tim?’
‘Absolutely.’ Tim stood up and rested his hand lightly on Laura’s shoulder. ‘Some coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’ Her head was heavy from the wine. She looked at her watch. ‘Good grief - it’s half past three.’
‘So?’ He plugged in the grinder.
‘You’ll be losing customers.’
‘On a day like this?’ said Avery. Hailstones were bouncing off the window. When the coffee arrived he mused aloud on the possibility of there being any choccies. Tim produced a dish of Godiva Manon Blanc and Avery said, ‘Ooohh - I shouldn’t.’
‘Why ask then, you ninny?’
The conversation reverted to the tragedy. Tim told Laura she knew where they were and if there was anything they could do, anything at all . . . Avery said she must come to dinner at the flat very soon, then asked what Max Jennings was really like. Tim spoke again and wondered if she’d thought about moving.
‘Moving? You mean the shop?’
‘No, no. From the village. You seem to have been terribly unhappy there,’ he continued, ‘since you fell for this chap. And if you stay you’ll just be endlessly reminded.’
And that was how Laura came to be sitting on her pretty little turquoise love seat five hours later surrounded by bumf from Causton’s many estate agents, one of whom was coming at ten in the morning to value her house. The speed with which she had accepted Tim’s suggestion left Laura with the feeling that she must have, eventually, come to just such a conclusion by herself.
She felt - not light-hearted, that would be going too far - but as if some sort of corner had been turned. Now that Gerald was no longer present, would never be present again, she would try to love him in a less tormented way. Grieve cleanly, as if for an old friend. And perhaps, eventually, resignation at her loss would transform itself into release.
As Brian approached the rusty railings encircling 13 Quarry Cottages he found a moment, even in the midst of extreme physical and emotional turmoil, to wonder at their nomenclature, for they were not only a mere two in number, but a hell of a stone’s throw from the nearest quarry.
He stood motionless beneath the sugary laden branches of a slender tree, doubly drained of colour by ice and moonlight. Frost nibbled at his vitals. He kept swallowing very fast in a futile attempt to slow down his heart rate and remain calm. He had stood precisely thus many times, including the night of Gerald’s murder, but never before by appointment.
To pass the time he ran through the three scenes he had, after much rewriting, finally completed. They were not entirely satisfactory. Rather like blancmange their outline was tremulous and their content hard to define.
The problem was that Brian, having been compelled to weigh freedom of expression - the ripe invention of his actors’ movement and dialogue - against his own future as a schoolmaster, had come down, quite unequivocally, in favour of the latter. Of course he was well aware that all his cuts could be reinstated ‘on the night’ or even (he fainted at the thought) improved upon. Nothing he could do about that but trust to luck.
It would be all right. Basically, at the end of the day, they were good kids. On his side. Like all ignored, neglected youngsters - and grown-ups too come to that - they only wanted admiration and respect. To be somebody. He understood that, oh yes. With all his heart and soul.
Brian pushed back his cuff and consulted his Kronograff Cosmopolitan. Numerals the colour of phosporescent mushy peas glowed up at him. It showed the time in London, Paris and New York and was water resistant to a hundred metres. Brian rubbed the glass admiringly with the back of his glove and, boldly risking radon poisoning, peered closely at the dial. It was good to know that whatever the occasion, whether strolling down the Boulevard Haussman or snorkelling in the Hudson, should a casual passer-by happen to be in need of the hour they would not ask in vain.
Brian became aware that the tip of his nose was frozen. Without a doubt the shirt he had finally decided on was not warm enough, even under his mother’s hand-knitted Aran cardie. He had decided to abandon his string vest. His baseball cap, through the back slot of which his plait had been pulled, did not really keep the warm in.
Edie had said nine o’clock. One minute to go. Trained up into precise punctuality since babyhood he could not bring himself to knock on the door a second earlier.
When she had come back after rehearsal to ask for help with her script his pleasure had been tempered by a certain sceptism. In fact he had gone so far as to check the corridor, half expecting to discover the rest of them snorting and giggling behind the swing doors. But it had been quite empty. And his suspicions had been completely vanquished when, as they were parting, she had said, ‘Don’t tell the others.’