‘Certainly not. How could it have been?’
‘Does the message convey nothing to you at all?’
‘Yes, she was obviously urging me to go to see her.’
‘And ‘‘Alas! the love of women!’’?’
Nick said: ‘Oh, yes. It’s from Byron.’
‘Tell us what that conveys to you.’
‘When we were – away together we …’ He hesitated: ‘… we read Don Juan.’ Why did these admissions sound so humiliatingly silly in a court of law. ‘ ‘‘Alas the love of women!’’ became rather a joke between us. Elizabeth used often to quote it.’
‘And what do you think might have been her purpose in putting it on the programme?’
‘She must have wanted to remind me of the time we’d spent together.’
‘As you know your Byron, Mr Talbot, perhaps you can complete the stanza for me.’
‘I’ve no idea how it goes on.’
‘Sure?’
Nick stared at the other man.
‘I’ve told you. I’ve no idea how it goes on.’
‘Perhaps she expected you to remember.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does most emphatically. Let me refresh your memory.’ Sir Alfred pouted his lips at his junior who hastily handed him a leather volume open at the right place. Sir Alfred began to read:
‘Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing;
For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if ’tis lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone.’
Here he paused, and added the last lines with some deliberation:
‘And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,
Deadly and quick and crushing …’
Wells glanced at the jury to see if they had taken in its significance, then turned again to Nick.
‘I put it to you that there was a very definite threat implied in the writing on the programme. I put it to you that you were terrified that Elizabeth Rusman intended to cause a break between you and your wife.’
‘I wasn’t in the least terrified,’ Nick said. ‘ The idea’s quite absurd.’
When Wells spoke again it seemed to be on a new tack. ‘Will you tell the court the nature of your present employment.’
Nick had been half expecting this. ‘At present I am acting as agent for my wife in arranging concert tours and generally represent her in a business capacity.’
‘I see. Then all the money she earns comes into your hands?’
‘It goes through my hands. I take a small percentage and the rest goes straight into her personal account.’
‘Apart from this income from your wife, what other personal money have you?’
Nick hesitated and glanced at the judge. ‘Is that necessary, my Lord?’
Mr Justice Ferguson’s pen came to a stop. ‘ I think it’s a relevant question.’
‘I have about two thousand pounds in cash and certain shares in an East African mining syndicate.’
Sir Alfred considered the answer. ‘Not a big fortune as fortunes go.’
‘Not as yours goes, perhaps.’
Careful! Nick, thought Philippa. Careful, darling.
Sir Alfred had turned to the judge.
‘My Lord, I ask to be protected from such unwarranted remarks.’
His Lordship said severely: ‘You must answer the questions in a proper manner, Mr Talbot.’
‘Yes, my Lord,’ said Nick, ‘ if they are put in a proper manner.’
The judge continued to look at him.
‘I don’t think this attitude will help you.’
Nick, Nick, thought Philippa, have patience.
‘Your father, I understand, was Brigadier Talbot, a soldier of some repute. Is it true that you were on bad terms with him?’
‘Far from it. On the whole we got on well together.’
‘On the whole. But you had strong differences of opinion?’
‘Yes. Chiefly over a matter of my career.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He wanted me to become a professional soldier like himself. I wanted to become an engineer.’
‘But you are not an engineer?’
‘No. Unhappily, we compromised by my becoming neither.’
‘How much money did your father leave you?’
‘About ten thousand pounds.’
‘Most of which you spent?’
‘Most of which I spent,’ Nick said contemptuously. He wasn’t going to go into details of the mining company that had failed.
‘Tell me, Mr Talbot, have you ever worked regularly in your life?’
Mr Tyler got up. ‘My Lord, I hope Sir Alfred has not forgotten that Mr Talbot has just been demobilized after a distinguished war service of five years – and that he is now only thirty. It doesn’t leave a great deal of time for him to have worked regularly – or even irregularly – at anything else.’
Sir Alfred amended his question. ‘ Would it be true to say, Mr Talbot, that in the few years prior to the war you were a bit of a rolling stone?’
‘I travelled a certain amount.’
‘And gathered no moss?’
‘I made no money.’
‘Far from making money, you spent your father’s.’
‘I invested it unfortunately.’
‘So that when you met Miss Shelley you had only a couple of thousand to your name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just enough to make a show on?’
‘I didn’t marry my wife for her money, if that’s what you mean.’
Joan Newcombe put her hand on her sister-in-law’s arm.
Nick added: ‘When I married my wife she had less money than I had.’
‘But a big future?’
‘It was not at all assured.’
‘It was assured on the night Elizabeth Rusman appeared, suddenly at Covent Garden?’
‘I’m glad to say it was.’
‘So that, in the event of a break up of your marriage, you then stood to lose not merely your wife’s affections but her money as well?’
‘There was no possibility whatever of a break up of our marriage.’
‘If there was a break up,’ said Wells, ‘did you or did you not stand to lose financially?’
‘I stood to lose far more than that.’
‘But you did stand to lose financially.’
Nick said angrily: ‘ Yes!’
Wells, satisfied, glanced again at his brief, but Mr Justice Ferguson had laid down his pen. ‘I think, Sir Alfred, that would be a suitable place at which to
adjourn.’
He stood up.
The second day was over.
Chapter Seventeen
Before he was taken back to Brixton for the week-end Philippa managed to get ten minutes with Nick. It was a matter largely at the discretion of the authorities, and in this case the authorities said yes. Philippa suspected Archer had had something to do with it.
She smiled at Nick with lips that were trying to look confident, and then he held her close. They forgot the attendant warder and knew only that they were together again. He was not lost yet – they both knew he was not lost – but they both felt it was going to be touch and go. As she came out of court she had heard a strange barrister say, ‘So Tyler’s gamble isn’t going to come off after all.’ And another one replied, ‘Still it was quite the best use of the poor material.’
Nick mustn’t know that.
‘That beastly counsel and his cheap sneers!’ she said.
‘Cheap but effective.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t really, my darling.’
Nick said: ‘Wells knows his juries. He’s rubbed it in about my immorality for all he’s worth, and he’s also got it firmly planted in their minds that I intended to live exclusively off you. There’ll be all the week-end for it to sink in, then on Monday hell really get going. D’you realize he’s not e
ven come to the crime yet.’
‘You’re looking on the black side. It isn’t so. You mustn’t doubt for a single moment. There’s only one possible result to this trial, and we know it.’
‘I wish the jury knew it.’
‘They do. Really they do. And on Monday or Tuesday they’ll say so.’
He said: ‘Those first weeks in Naples, it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t meet you clear-mindedly, that I was still likely to be dragging along the trivial tag ends of things finished and done with years before. I should have realized it, but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t.’
She smiled back at him. ‘Oh, nonsense …’
‘No … Not nonsense, Philippa. But it’s really a question of having a few adventures when one’s young, and being unsophisticated enough at the time to think them gay and romantic. It isn’t really until one of them comes home to roost in a court of law that it’s made to look tawdry and vulgar.’
‘Everything looks tawdry in a court of law.’
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘Not everything.’
There was a moment’s silence. Time was passing.
‘Joan sends her love,’ she said quickly. ‘ I’m spending the week-end down there again. Next week we’ll go down together. From then on we’ll really start everything over afresh.’
‘Phil, I want to say … that one thing’s stood the strain of these weeks, hasn’t it.’
‘Nick, did you ever have the least doubt?’
‘Not doubt,’ he said. ‘I knew it. But I didn’t know it all. From the first moment you’ve been a rock. You’ve never doubted for an instant, have you?’
Philippa did not answer.
‘Well, there’s something I want you to promise me. Whichever way this turns out, you must look on it as an interlude in your life. Whichever way I come out of it, you’re too important to get twisted so young. I want to be by you always, giving you love and support But if by any chance I’m not …’
‘You must be. Promise you will be.’
‘I will be,’ said Nick. ‘Some way.’
‘Goodbye, my love.’
‘Goodbye.’
Philippa went out.
She went out of the prisoners’ room and out of the Old Bailey to John and Joan Newcombe who were waiting for her; and fifty minutes’ run in a car took them to their home in Surrey, where the trees were just in their first green and a cow lowed at milking-time. And the two scenes just did not belong to the same planet: they existed jointly in Pbilippa’s mind and had contact nowhere else.
She slept fitfully and woke at last just after dawn, to find rain dripping on the window. She dressed listlessly, watching the downpour, and spent the morning helping Joan to put up a rufflette rail over the window of Leslie’s bedroom.
Somehow the presence of Leslie whistling and chattering about the house was a comfort. Here was the normal, the ordinary, the unimpressed. Leslie knew all about Uncle Nick, but he was at an age when the life in him could not be contained. Cork him down at one point and he bubbled out at another.
It rained the whole day. Joan said it was the only drawback to living in the country, you couldn’t get away from the weather. A tonic when the sun shone, a liability when everything dripped and splashed and wept.
In the afternoon they sat over tea a long time. Cheated of his golf, John was working on The Times crossword. Leslie was busy with his stamp album, carrying on a, muttered conversation with himself, since none of his elders was willing to be drawn in. Joan and Philippa had talked over the trial for the nth time. Joan believed now that Mike Grieve had committed the crime, but Philippa, like Nick, was doubtful. It was the sort of thing that could have happened, but some instinct told her it hadn’t.
At last Joan said: ‘We’re getting no further! I confess I’m desperately anxious. Let’s try and forget it for the time being. Won’t you sing something?’
Philippa said: ‘I couldn’t. I think I’ve lost my voice altogether.’
Nevertheless, once suggested, the lure of the piano was not to be put aside; and a bit later she went across to it. She couldn’t sing; but instead she played part of Schubert’s G Major Sonata.
Even her fingers were stiff, as if they had not touched a piano for years. Drearily, uneasily she browsed through a few of her earlier pieces and then fell silent.
Leslie said: ‘Where’s Venny-zu-eela, Dad?’
John looked up: ‘Um? Venezuela. In South America. You’ll get jam on your stamps that way.’
‘Daddy, look at this head. The postmark says Porto something. Crikey, I think –’
‘Not too loud, dear,’ his mother said in an undertone, and made a movement of her head in Philippa’s direction. All day she had been trying to tone Leslie down. But it was a pretty hopeless task.
What was that manuscript thing among Elizabeth Rusman’s belongings? Philippa thought. How did it go? I did remember it for a time. The first notes were: E, C, D, E, G … F, E, D, E, C …
She tried this out on the piano, adding simple harmonics, and soon remembered how it went.
Leslie, full of philatelic zest, hesitated a moment now that Aunt Philippa was playing again. Then he touched his father on the arm.
‘The postmark says Porto Rico, Dad. Where’s that?’
‘Er –’ John looked up again. ‘ In South America too.’
‘Yes, but what part of South America?’
‘I thought you were good at geography,’ John said. ‘You tell me.’
This was too much for Leslie. ‘You don’t know!’ he exclaimed in delight. ‘Mummy, Daddy doesn’t know where Porto Rico is! Isn’t that great!’
John laughed good-temperedly. ‘Get the atlas and well look it up.’
They looked it up.
Philippa rose from the piano and went to the window and lit a cigarette. The glass was steaming with the rain. The dark drooping greenness out of doors suited her mood.
She was full of harrowing afterthoughts about the trial, being sure now that she might have found something more to say which might have helped. to influence the jury. She had expected a much longer ordeal in the box; but Wells had seemed to want to cut it as short as possible. And she was worried too about the judge’s question to her. ‘You ask us to believe,’ he had begun, as if he did not believe himself. Did that mean the judge was against them?
‘ ‘‘Porto Rico,’’ ’ read Leslie. ‘ ‘‘A West Indian island lying seventy-five miles east of Haiti.’’ Where’s Haiti, Daddy?’
‘A West Indian island,’ said John, ‘seventy-five miles west of Porto Rico.’
Leslie looked mischievously at his father. ‘Anyway, it isn’t in South America.’
Silence fell, while the rain continued to run down the glass. Leslie flipped over the pages of his album and whistled under his breath.
Suddenly Philippa turned and stared across the room, the cigarette smouldering in her hand. Then in a flash she was across the room and standing opposite the boy.
For a few seconds Leslie was unaware of the move.
‘Porto, Porto, Porto, Porter, Porter, Po-po-po-po …’ he went on.
Joan Newcombe, alarmed, stood up.
‘Philippa …’
‘Leslie,’ said Philippa.
Leslie jumped. ‘What?’
‘Philippa, dear, is he annoying you?’
‘Leslie!’ said Philippa. ‘What’s that you were whistling? What is it you were whistling? Tell me.’
‘Um?’ said Leslie, frightened by the look on her face and getting up. ‘What’s what, Aunt Philippa?’
‘Was it the whistling that upset you?’
Her face white to the lips, Philippa turned to Joan.
‘Please, Joan. Just a minute … That tune, Leslie. Where did you hear it?’
Leslie stared. ‘Which one? I don’t know what you mean.’
John too was on his feet, but Philippa ran past him to the piano.
‘This one,’ she said.
After a few moments Leslie’s face cl
eared. ‘Why, you’d just played it, Aunt Philippa. That’s why I whistled it.’
‘Yes, but where did you hear it, before? You couldn’t have whistled it straight off after me if you hadn’t heard it somewhere before!’
Leslie frowned. ‘I – I don’t remember. Why?’
‘It sounds a very ordinary little tune,’ John said. ‘ What’s all the fuss about, Philippa?’
‘Just for a minute please,’ she said, ‘try not to interrupt us. It’s desperately important. Listen while I play it.’
There was silence at last while she played it again.
‘It sounds like a hymn,’ Joan said.
‘Leslie …’
Reassured now that he had not committed some awful sin, Leslie put his wits to work.
‘Ye-es,’ he said. ‘I remember it now. It’s the tune Bungey Baker had on the brain in the Christmas hols. He kept on whistling it till I got it too.’
‘Who is Bungey Baker?’
‘Don’t you know Bungey Baker?’ Leslie asked in surprise. ‘ I thought everyone knew Bungey Baker. He’s one of those chaps who seem to know everybody …’
‘He’s a boy Leslie met on his holidays last year and they struck up a friendship,’ Joan said. ‘He spent Christmas with us. Philippa, I wish you’d explain –’
‘Where does he live?’ Philippa asked the boy. ‘Have you his address?’
Leslie frowned. ‘It’s in Hampstead. I can’t remember where, but I can get it you in a jiff. He lent me a book, and I’ve got it upstairs. Would you like me to fetch it now?’
‘Please, Leslie.’
The boy ran off.
And then Philippa explained.
For a few minutes they were irritatingly slow to see the significance of the facts, irritatingly anxious that she should not build too much on it.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I know it may lead to nothing. But don’t you see I’ve got to follow it. I’ve got to see the boy Baker tonight and find out where he learned that tune. He must have heard it a lot somewhere, and it’s the fact that it was in manuscript in Elizabeth Rusman’s case which makes it so important. I did try one or two music shops and none of them knew it. You see, if it was printed, why should she bother to copy it in manuscript form?’
They couldn’t answer her, although they were only half convinced. She had done so much this last month, Swindon, Bournemouth, Canterbury, Utrecht, extravagant quests that had led nowhere. Did this mean another one right in the middle of the trial?