‘He fell. He fell.’ The screaming woman was on the edge of hysterics and couldn’t stop shouting. ‘He fell. I saw him. From up there. He fell.’
Luke-John said ‘Christ’ several times and looked badly shocked. Derry shook out a whole pot of paper clips on to his desk and absentmindedly put them back one by one.
‘You’re sure he was dead?’ he said.
‘His office was seven floors up.’
‘Yeah.’ He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Poor old boy.’ Nil nisi bonum. A sharp change of attitude.
Luke-John looked out of the Blaze window and down along the street. The smashed remains of Bert Checkov had been decently removed. The pavement had been washed. People tramped unknowingly across the patch where he had died.
‘He was drunk,’ Luke-John said. ‘Worse than usual.’
He and Derry made a desultory start on the afternoon work. I had no need to stay as the Editor had O.K.’d my copy, but I hung around anyway for an hour or two, not ready to go.
They had said in Bert’s office that he came back paralytic from lunch and simply fell out of the window. Two girl secretaries saw him. He was taking a drink out of the neck of the bottle of whisky, and he suddenly staggered against the window, which swung open, and he toppled out. The bottom of the window was at hip height. No trouble at all for someone as drunk as Bert.
I remembered the desperation behind the bit of advice he had given me.
And I wondered.
2
Three things immediately struck you about the girl who opened the stockbroker Tudor door at Virginia Water. First, her poise. Second, her fashion sense. Third, her colour. She had honey toast skin, large dark eyes and a glossy shoulder length bounce of black hair. A slightly broad nose and a mouth to match enhanced a landscape in which negro and Caucasian genes had conspired together to do a grand job.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’m James Tyrone. I telephoned …’
‘Come in,’ she nodded. ‘Harry and Sarah should be back at any minute.’
‘They are still playing golf?’
‘Mm.’ She turned, smiling slightly, and gestured me into the house. ‘Still finishing lunch, I expect.’
It was three thirty-five. Why not?
She led me through the hall (well-polished parquet, careful flowers, studded leather umbrella stand) into a chintz and chrysanthemum sitting-room. Every window in the house was a clutter of diamond shaped leaded lights which might have had some point when glass could only be made in six inch squares and had to be joined together to get anywhere. The modern imitation obscured the light and the view and was bound to infuriate window cleaners. Harry and Sarah had opted also for uncovered dark oak beams with machine-made chisel marks. The single picture on the plain cream walls made a wild contrast: a modern impressionistic abstract of some cosmic explosion, with the oils stuck on in lumps.
‘Sit down.’ She waved a graceful hand at a thickly cushioned sofa. ‘Like a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Don’t journalists drink all day?’
‘If you drink and write, the writing isn’t so hot.’
‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘Dylan Thomas said he had to be stone cold for any good to come of it.’
‘Different class,’ I smiled.
‘Same principle.’
‘Absolutely.’
She gave me a long inspection, her head an inch tilted to one side and her green dress lying in motionless folds down her slender body. Terrific legs in the latest in stockings ended in shiny green shoes with gold buckles, and the only other accessory on display was a broad strapped gold watch on her left wrist.
‘You’ll know me again,’ she said.
I nodded. Her body moved subtly inside the green dress.
She said slowly, with more than simple meaning, ‘And I’ll know you.’
Her voice, face and manner were quite calm. The brief flash of intense sexual awareness could have been my imagination. Certainly her next remark held no undertone and no invitation.
‘Do you like horses?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said.
‘Six months ago I would have said the one place I would never go would be to a race meeting.’
‘But you go now?’
‘Since Harry won Egocentric in that raffle life has changed in this little neck of the woods.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is exactly what I want to write about.’
I was on Tally business. Background to the Lamplighter. My choice of untypical racehorse owners, Harry and Sarah Hunterson, came back at that point from their Sunday golf course lunch, sweeping in with them a breeze compounded of healthy links air, expensive cigar smoke and half digested gin.
Harry was big, sixtyish, used to authority, heavily charming and unshakably Tory. I guessed that he read the Telegraph and drove a three litre Jaguar. With automatic transmission, of course. He gave me a hearty handshake and said he was glad to see his niece had been looking after me.
‘Yes, thank you.’
Sarah said, ‘Gail dear, you didn’t give Mr Tyrone a drink.’
‘He didn’t want one.’
The two women were coolly nice to each other in civilised voices. Sarah must have been about thirty years older, but she had worked hard at keeping nature at bay. Everything about her looked careful, from the soft gold rinse via the russet coloured dress to the chunky brown golfing shoes. Her well-controlled shape owed much to the drinking man’s diet, and only a deep sag under the chin gave the game away. Neither golf nor gin had dug wrinkles anywhere except round her eyes. Her mouth still had fullness and shape. The wrappings were good enough to hold out hopes of a spark-striking mind, but these proved unrealistic. Sarah was all-of-a-piece, with attitudes and opinions as tidy and well-ordered and as imitative as her house.
Harry was easy to interview in the aftermath of the nineteenth hole.
‘I bought this raffle ticket at the Golf Club dance, you see. Some chap was there selling them, a friend of a friend, you know, and I gave him a quid. Well, you know how it is at a dance. For charity, he said. I thought a quid was a bit steep for a raffle ticket, even if it was for a horse. Though I didn’t want a horse, mind you. Last thing I wanted. And then damn me if I didn’t go and win it. Bit of a problem, eh? To suddenly find yourself saddled with a racehorse?’ He laughed, expecting a reward for his little joke.
I duly obliged. Sarah and Gail were both wearing the expressions which meant they had heard him say saddled with a racehorse so often that they had to grit their teeth now at each repetition.
‘Would you mind,’ I said, ‘telling me something of your background and history?’
‘Life story, eh?’ He laughed loudly, looking from Sarah to Gail to collect their approval. His head was heavily handsome though a shade too fleshy round the neck. The bald sunburned crown and the well disciplined moustache suited him. Thread veins made circular patches of colour on his cheeks. ‘Life story,’ he repeated. ‘Where shall I start?’
‘Start from birth,’ I said, ‘and go on from there.’
Only the very famous who have done it too often, or the extremely introverted, or the sheer bloody-minded, can resist such an invitation. Harry’s eyes lit up, and he launched forth with enthusiasm.
Harry had been born in a Surrey suburb in a detached house a size or two smaller than the one he now owned. He had been to a day school and then a minor public school and was turned down by the army because as soon as he left school he had pleurisy. He went to work in the City, in the head office of a finance company, and had risen from junior clerk to director, on the way using occasional snippets of information to make himself modest capital gains via the stockmarket. Nothing shady, nothing rash: but enough so that there should be no drop in his standard of living when he retired.
He married at twenty-four and five years later a lorry rammed his car and killed his wife, his three year old daughter, and his widowed mother. For fifteen years, much in demand at dinner parties, Harry ‘l
ooked around’. Then he met Sarah in some Conservative Party committee rooms where they were doing voluntary work addressing pamphlets for a by-election, and they had married three months later. Below the confident fruitiness of successful Harry’s voice there was an echo of the motivation of this second marriage. Harry had begun to feel lonely.
As lives went, Harry’s had been uneventful. No Blaze material in what he had told me, and precious little for Tally. Resignedly, I asked him if he intended to keep Egocentric indefinitely.
‘Yes, yes, I think so,’ he said. ‘He has made quite a remarkable difference to us.’
‘In what way?’
‘It puts them several notches up in lifemanship,’ Gail said coolly. ‘Gives them something to boast about in pubs.’
We all looked at her. Such was her poise that I found it impossible to tell whether she meant to be catty or teasing, and from his uncertain expression, so did her uncle. There was no ducking it, however, that she had hit to the heart of things, and Sarah smoothly punished her for it.
‘Gail dear, would you go and make tea for all of us?’
Gail’s every muscle said she would hate to. But she stood up ostentatiously slowly, and went.
‘A dear girl,’ Sarah said. ‘Perhaps sometimes a little trying.’ Insincerity took all warmth out of her smile, and she found it necessary to go on, to make an explanation that I guessed she rushed into with every stranger at the first opportunity.
‘Harry’s sister married a barrister … such a clever man, you know … but well … African.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Of course we’re very fond of Gail, and as her parents have gone back to his country since it became independent, and as she was born in England and wanted to stay here, well we … well, she lives here with us.’
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘That must be very nice for her.’
Sad, I thought, that they felt any need to explain. Gail didn’t need it.
‘She teaches at an art school in Victoria,’ Harry added. ‘Fashion drawing.’
‘Fashion design,’ Sarah corrected him. ‘She’s really quite good at it. Her pupils win prizes, and things like that.’ There was relief in her voice now that I understood, and she was prepared to be generous. To do her justice, considering the far-back embedded prejudices she clearly suffered from, she had made a successful effort. But a pity the effort showed.
‘And you,’ I said, ‘How about your life? And what do you think of Egocentric?’
She said apologetically that her story wasn’t as interesting as Harry’s. Her first husband, an optician, had died a year before she met Harry, and all she had done, apart from short excursions into voluntary work, was keep house for the two of them. She was glad Harry had won the horse, she liked going to the races as an owner, she thought it exciting to bet, but ten shillings was her usual, and she and Gail had found it quite fun inventing Harry’s racing colours.
‘What are they?’
‘White with scarlet and turquoise question marks, turquoise sleeves, red cap.’
‘They sound fine,’ I smiled. ‘I’ll look out for them.’
Harry said his trainer was planning to fit in one more race for Egocentric before the Lamplighter, and maybe I would see him then. Maybe I would, I said, and Gail brought in the tea.
Harry and Sarah rapidly downed three cups each, simultaneously consulted their watches, and said it was time to be getting along to the Murrows’ for drinks.
‘I don’t think I’ll come,’ Gail said. ‘Tell them thanks, but I have got some work to do. But I’ll come and fetch you, if you like, if you think it might be better not to drive home. Give me a ring when you’re ready.’
The Murrow drinks on top of the golf club gin were a breathalyser hazard in anyone’s book. Harry and Sarah nodded and said they would appreciate it.
‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘could you let me see any newspaper cuttings you have? And any photographs?’
‘Certainly, certainly,’ Harry agreed. ‘Gail will show them to you, won’t you honey? Must dash now, old chap, the Murrows, you know … President of the golf club. Nice to have met you. Hope you’ve got all the gen you need … don’t hesitate to call if you want to know anything else.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, but he was gone before I finished. They went upstairs and down, and shut the front door, and drove away. The house settled into quiet behind them.
‘They’re not exactly alcoholic,’ Gail said. ‘They just go eagerly from drink to drink.’
Gail’s turn to explain. But in her voice, only objectivity: no faintest hint of apology, as there had been in Sarah’s.
‘They enjoy life,’ I said.
Gail’s eyebrows rose. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I suppose they do. I’ve never really thought about it.’
Self-centred, I thought. Cool. Unaffectionate. Everything I disliked in a woman. Everything I needed one to be. Much too tempting.
‘Do you want to see those photographs?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please.’
She fetched an expensive leather folder and we went through them one by one. Nothing in the few clippings that I hadn’t learnt already. None of the photographs were arresting enough for Tally. I said I’d come back one day soon, with a photographer. Gail put the folder away and I stood up to go.
‘It’ll be two hours yet before they ring up from the Murrows. Stay and have that drink now?’
I looked at my watch. There was a train every thirty minutes. I supposed I could miss the next. There was Elizabeth. And there was Gail. And it was only an hour.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’
She gave me beer and brought one for herself. I sat down again on the sofa and she folded herself gracefully onto a large velvet cushion on the floor.
‘You’re married, of course?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘The interesting looking ones always are.’
‘Then why aren’t you?’
Her teeth flashed liquid white in an appreciative smile. ‘Ah … marriage can wait.’
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘I suppose … until I find a man I can’t bear to part with.’
‘You’ve parted with quite a few?’
‘Quite a few.’ She nodded and sipped her beer, and looked at me over the rim. ‘And you? Are you faithful to your wife?’
I felt myself blink. I said carefully, ‘Most of the time.’
‘But not always?’
‘Not always.’
After a long considering pause she said one short word.
‘Good.’
‘And is that,’ I asked, ‘a philosophic comment, or a proposition?’
She laughed. ‘I just like to know where I stand.’
‘Clear eyed and wide awake …?’
‘I hate muddle,’ she nodded.
‘And emotional muddle especially?’
‘You’re so right.’
She had never loved, I thought. Sex, often. Love, never. Not what I liked, but what I wanted. I battened down the insidious whisper and asked her, like a good little journalist, about her job.
‘It serves.’ She shrugged. ‘You get maybe one authentic talent in every hundred students. Mostly their ambition is five times more noticeable than their ideas.’
‘Do you design clothes yourself?’
‘Not for the rag trade. Some for myself, and for Sarah, and for the school. I prefer to teach. I like being able to turn vaguely artistic ignorance into competent workmanship.’
‘And to see your influence all along Oxford Street?’
She nodded, her eyes gleaming with amusement. ‘Five of the biggest dress manufacturers now have old students of mine on their design staff. One of them is so individual that I can spot his work every time in the shop windows.’
‘You like power,’ I said.
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Heady stuff.’
‘All power currupts?’ She was sarcastic.
‘Each to
his own corruption,’ I said mildly. ‘What’s yours, then?’
She laughed. ‘Money, I guess. There’s a chronic shortage of the folding stuff in all forms of teaching.’
‘So you make do with power.’
‘If you can’t have everything,’ she nodded, ‘you make do with something.’
I looked down into my beer, unable to stop the contraction I could feel in my face. Her words so completely summed up my perennial position. After eleven years I was less resigned to it than ever.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Taking you to bed.’
She gasped. I looked up from the flat brown liquid ready for any degree of feminine outrage. I could have mistaken her.
It seemed I hadn’t. She was laughing. Pleased.
‘That’s pretty blunt.’
‘Mm.’
I put down the beer and stood up, smiling. ‘Time to go,’ I said. I’ve a train to catch.’
‘After that? You can’t go after that.’
‘Especially after that.’
For answer she stood up beside me, took hold of my hand, and put my fingers into the gold ring at the top of the zipper down the front of her dress.
‘Now go home,’ she said.
‘We’ve only known each other three hours,’ I protested.
‘You were aware of me after three minutes.’
I shook my head. ‘Three seconds.’
Her teeth gleamed. ‘I like strangers.’
I pulled the ring downwards and it was clearly what she wanted.
Harry and Sarah had a large white fluffy rug in front of their fireplace. I imagined it was not the first time Gail had lain on it. She was brisk, graceful, unembarrassed. She stripped off her stockings and shoes, shook off the dress, and stepped out of the diminutive green bra and panties underneath it. Her tawny skin looked warm in the gathering dusk, and her shape took the breath away.
She gave me a marvellous time. A generous lover as well as practised. She knew when to touch lightly, and when to be vigorous. She had strong internal muscles, and she knew how to use them. I took her with passionate gratitude, a fair substitute for love.