‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well, this letter from his headmaster. This was with his school report last year. You know what it says, of course?’
‘Oh, that … I do remember it.’
Dr Meiss read out: ‘ ‘‘David has a variety of talents, but a clear determination not to make use of them in school time. He refuses discipline whenever he can, makes few friends, and appears to want to live in a world of his own. He seems to have a disregard for proper restraint where his own urges are concerned. I am coming to have grave doubts about his willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of growing up.’’ ’
‘Oh, yes, that’s Mr Cartwright; but I shouldn’t pay much attention to him, doctor. He’s well known for his prejudices. David will probably tell you all about him.’
‘He talks freely about his school, then? I mean, to you?’
‘Yes, yes. When I ask him he tells me. He’s always very frank and very honest with me.’
‘I understand from David that there was some disagreement between you and your husband as to whether he should be sent to a normal preparatory school – away from home, I mean.’
Mrs Abden fingered the short pearl necklace around her throat, slowly, individually, like prayer beads.
‘I have never felt David was strong enough for the rough and tumble of boarding-school life.’
‘Why? Is he delicate? He’s well developed. Tall for his age. Looks strong.’
‘We nearly lost him with rheumatic fever when he was seven. And he catches cold very easily. And gets quickly tired. Believe me, Dr Meiss, I should know’
The psychiatrist made a note or two. They were of no importance but they helped him to think. One trod delicately.
‘Do you think still to keep David at his day school? I mean, when he restarts next term.’
‘Why not?’
‘He is clearly not very happy there.’
‘Where else would he be more happy? Though in fact Kenneth …’
‘Kenneth?’
‘Mr Kingsley. Our solicitor, as you know, and a great personal friend. I can’t imagine how I should have got through this time without him. He has advised on so many things.’
‘And he thinks?’
Mrs Abden blinked. ‘He thinks it might be a good thing if David went away. At least for a time.’
‘Perhaps I shall be able to advise you on this in a month or so.’
‘Kenneth thinks David should go to Loretto, as planned. That’s if they will still have him.’
‘Why should they not? After the coroner’s verdict no stigma should attach to your son.’
It was in the papers, you know. ‘‘ Baronet’s brother dies in kitchen brawl.’’ These things stick. People will go on talking.’
Dr Meiss coughed into his hand. Time was overrunning and another patient was almost due.
‘Far more important, Mrs Abden, is to get David into the frame of mind when he will study to pass the Common Entrance. He looks to me the sort of boy who should profit from the education a public school provides. But I will know better after a few more meetings.’
‘I hope it helps. As I say, it was Mr Kingsley’s idea. He felt that it had all been a terrible shock for the boy, and that if he came to you it might help to clear up any anxieties or fears …’
‘Is he greatly attached to you?’
‘Who?’
‘David, of course.’
The lines on Mrs Abden’s forehead sharply deepened. ‘David and I have always thought the world of each other.’
‘I’m glad of that.’
She hesitated and then went on: ‘Only last year, when my husband was away, I was laid low with tonsillitis. David did everything. He’d – he would even come in and tuck me up before saying goodnight.’
‘So he will co-operate with me more completely if you encourage him to do so, if you let him know that you want him to come.’
Mrs Abden opened her bag, took out a compact, peered at herself, then, reassured, snapped it shut.
‘Where is David now?’
‘In my small sitting-room. With my receptionist.’
Mrs Abden said rapidly: ‘It’s difficult for an outsider like you – I don’t wish to be impolite, Dr Meiss – but it’s hard for someone outside to understand what has happened. We were … a happy family, really. You can’t know what I felt for Stewart. I cared for him …’
Meiss nodded. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘He was hard to manage at times, I know. My husband, I mean. And when he was worried about money matters he would drink too much. Without that he would have been very different … But then, who hasn’t little crosses to bear? Even if a man is difficult it does not stop you from caring. Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, in this, I’ve been in hell. I mean! The two people I love most, they do this to each other! How do you feel at the end of it? How do you? Whose fault was it?’
‘At the inquest, Mrs Abden, you said that your husband bullied David.’
‘That’s true.’
‘You said that that evening he even threatened to kill him.’
Rachel Abden fingered her pearls uncertainly. ‘It was nearly true. By then I could do nothing to help Stewart. He was – gone. I could only try to make things easier for David.’
Meiss nodded again. ‘What you tell me will, of course, go no further. The tragedy is over. Your son is in no danger from the law. It is simply that I am trying to find out why this quarrel between them went farther than any had gone before. You – I presume you did not say anything to either of them that might have provoked the quarrel?’
‘For God’s sake, why should I? What are you accusing me of?’
‘Nothing at all, believe me … Did your son say anything to his father especially to provoke his anger on this occasion?’
‘He … well, no.’
She looked at the psychiatrist. Her umber-dark eyes were full of the emotional tears her son’s had lacked.
‘You don’t want to speak of this?’
She said: ‘David called his father a particularly foul name. His father said: ‘‘I’ll have the hide off you for that!’’ ’
‘He did not actually threaten to kill David?’
‘No … I don’t think so.’
‘You added it to help David?’
‘Mr Kingsley advised me to say that.’
‘I see.’
After a minute she said: ‘ I don’t think I’ll ever forgive David – properly, that is, altogether.’
‘You must try not to think that.’
‘Oh, I know, I know. It’s easy to say, but hard …’
‘Did he push his father, as you said at the inquest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that not something Mr Kingsley also advised you to say?’
‘Of course not! He – he thrust at him hard in the chest and Stewart sort of lost his balance and turned and fell and struck his head on the fender …’
Meiss thought over carefully what Kingsley had told him, but decided not to confront her with it. He said: ‘ You will forgive me for being so persistent. All this you will have been asked before, and you may think my insistence is an impertinence. Believe me, it is not meant so. But if I can begin to find from you any cause of this quarrel this particular night …’
‘How does any quarrel begin? They were – jealous of each other – I believe. The slightest thing would start them off.’
‘It’s not unusual, of course. When a son grows up it is a commonplace for him and his father to have a resentment of each other. We have all heard of Oedipus.’
She said: ‘I don’t think it was quite like that. David was really quite fond of his father. That was the strange thing. That made it worse.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘ Really. I suppose in a way they were a little jealous about me. They both – wanted me, wanted to be first in my attention, my love. I suppose you’re right in a way. Sometimes I blame myself.’
??
?Oh?’
‘Couldn’t I – shouldn’t I – have stopped it?’
‘Stopped what?’
‘This jealous, this rivalry I should have been able to do something.’
‘Perhaps subconsciously you were flattered.’
She blinked her tears angrily away. ‘ What sort of a wife and mother do you think I am?’
‘I did say subconsciously, Mrs Abden. After all, this also is not uncommon. Everyone wishes to be popular, to be desired.’
‘I’ve not slept properly since it happened, except with Nembutal. Even now I take Valium every day. It’s been terrible. A nightmare. Mr Kingsley says he does not know how I have come through it.’
Eventually Dr Meiss said: ‘Will next Thursday be convenient? For me to see David again?’
‘I suppose we could manage the afternoon.’
‘At three, then?’
She wiped her eyes again, on her dignity now. Meiss said: ‘Has David not ever been to Scotland?’
‘Oh, yes. His father took him last year to see Loretto.’
‘Strange.’
‘What’s strange about that?’
‘He told me he had never been. Does he not like it, I wonder?’
‘It may be. I don’t know. Of course his father had quarrelled with his relatives up there. They never met or corresponded in any way.’
‘You are not Scottish, Mrs Abden?’
‘No.’
Chapter One
I
It was fairly well on in the swinging sixties that I met her, and I had just missed the worldwide celebrations for my twenty-fourth birthday.
The party was at Lady Rowton’s. Maud Rowton, being the wife of a recently created life peer, was not sure of her way in society, and was trying to launch her daughter Caroline into the whirlpool of a Season. From my experience of the two previous years, when I had escorted any number of girls on any number of occasions, I knew better than she did the intricacies of getting ‘ in’ the concentric circles which exist, of which only the inner two or three are anything but hell. Every year around these inner circles runs a pack of yelping girls who at the end of the summer have done all the proper and expected and expensive things, without ever having achieved the accolade of acceptance.
Caroline Rowton was a bright kid who unfortunately had inherited her father’s lantern jaw. It was not this, however, that would mar her chances. Some of the girls in the very centre of things had faces like starving horses. It was just that her mother had not been to school with enough mothers of the right sort.
So I felt sorry for her in a detached way, and when Jerry Dawson, who had brought me, said would I stay behind and go to a dinner party after, I said of course, hardly listening to him, wondering why I had come. Was this the life I really wanted to lead: all this inhaling of other people’s hot breath – bangles, jangles, cigarette smoke, high voices, high heels, fractured conversations, sweat, assessing eyes, polite masks, smeared lipstick, alcohol, flip, flap, standing about holding a glass, all a strain on legs, on shoulders, on bellies, on buttocks, on one’s patience. But then I often asked myself questions like this. What life did I want to lead – if any?
‘Where did you say?’
‘It’ll be at the Savoy. One of their chaps has stood them up.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Who’s that woman by the window?’
‘The one in black? With the sleeves? Mme Shona.’
‘Who?’
‘My dear chap, you ought to know.’
‘Why?’
‘Well … our line of business.’
‘What – d’you mean the one who makes … Well, well, rather a surprise, isn’t she? I always imagine these women as well-preserved old dragons of seventy-five.’
‘She’ll get like that in her own time. Want to meet her?’
Did I? It might make a change.
‘Yes, I think so. She looks interesting.’
Jerry chuckled. ‘Oh, interesting is quite the word. But take care. She has a reputation.’
The reply that came to my lips seemed a trifle malapert, so I said nothing. It’s strange what repression of the sort I’d just experienced will do to the frankest of men.
In a while I found myself going up to the throne. At the time I reckoned her about thirty-five, though a closer look added a year or two. No beauty, and I didn’t think ever had been; and pretty wasn’t a word you could ever use about her. Five feet seven inches tall, I was told much later, and weighed 117 pounds. Skin pale to dusky; hair black and a bit lank but capable, I was also to learn, of being disciplined, like many other things, to the order of its owner: two or three twists of the long fingers and it would be changed from low life to haute couture. Really handsome dark eyes, equable brows, big clever mouth. An air. Certainly a smashing-looking woman, I said to myself. It was a word you used in those days.
When Jerry Dawson had gone off I casually helped to refill her glass and she nodded her thanks, but Caroline Rowton was speaking to her so I had this minute or so to sum her up and to listen for the first time to the tenor bell of her voice, the too perfect English fretted with a lisp of accent.
‘You work for Yardley’s?’ Suddenly I was in the firing line. I met her brooding candescent stare for the first time.
‘I joined them earlier this year.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded as if this explained something.
‘Not quite in your league, ma’am.’
‘Oh.’ She shrugged, taking it without hesitation as a compliment. ‘They are far bigger than we are – and far older – longer established. But I agree, I do not look on them as rivals. I should not have thought …’
People came between us. ‘What would you not have thought?’ I prompted when they had gone.
‘That you were in the business.’
‘Should it show? Like a shoulder strap?’
‘A shoulder … ah no.’ A flicker of her thin lips. ‘But you know how it is: certain professions tend to attract types, certain businesses.’
‘In what way don’t I fit the slot?’
She looked at me soberly. ‘Now you are asking for compliments.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘No? … But you were expecting that.’
‘I never,’ I said, ‘ask for anything.’
‘That I believe. Instead of asking, you would try to take.’
This was a little near the bone in more ways than one.
‘You read me well, Mme Shona.’
‘All right. All right … First, there are no such things as slots. Are there. I was wrong in that. What did you do before you joined Yardley?’
‘For a while I was not gainfully employed, Jerry stepped in and offered me this job.’
‘And what is this job? What position?’
‘Assistant sales director.’
‘You’re young for that, Mr – er –’
‘David Abden. I don’t think age should come into it, do you?’
She breathed out through her nose. On a cold day you could imagine fine visible discharges of smoky breath as from the nostrils of a thoroughbred mare.
She said: ‘Age has no privileges. Youth no virtue. It is what one does that matters.’
We were apart for a bit. I kept looking across at her, slim and straight in one of those black sheath things; this one with dazzling gold sleeves. I began to figure if there was anything in it for me. I hadn’t had the least intention of staying in the perfumery business longer than it took to find something better or to rediscover one of the easier ways of making money, but I had to keep an open mind in all these things.
I couldn’t get hold of Jerry, who was the centre of a crowd, but I saw Patrick Favill in a corner. Patrick was a television writer and sometimes worked for the press.
‘Shona?’ he said. ‘I know her. Everybody knows her; but nobody gets close, as it were. What d’you want to know? She’s Russian, of course. You know the legend, I suppose.’
‘If I’ve heard it I wasn’t listening
.’
‘They say she was picked up by American troops when they were invading Germany at the end of the war.’
‘So?’
‘They found her in rags, they say, barefoot, starving, but with books by Schopenhauer and Goethe clutched under one skinny arm. That’s the story anyhow.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, she claimed she’d walked all the way from – was it? – Kharkov or Lvov, begging, stealing, living off the land, sleeping under hedges, dodging the retreating armies. The American commandant didn’t know quite what to make of her – thought she was some kind of ‘‘plant’’ at first, but she convinced him she was on the level and only keen to put as much territory as she could between herself and Uncle Joe.’
I waited. He glanced at me, lifted an eyebrow. ‘So she ended up in Paris – lived there a few years – married, came over to England and a bit later started this business that everyone has heard about.’
‘Is she still married?’
‘I think so. But one doesn’t hear much of him.’ Favill’s nose quivered at the sight of another drink approaching. ‘ Thanks, darling.’ He sipped. ‘One can’t of course get much personal corroboration of the story from her. I’ve asked her and she just shrugs and smiles. One can understand.’
‘Why?’
‘It dates her.’
I began to calculate. ‘She could have been in her teens.’
‘Who knows? They say she studied for the ballet and took it up again in Paris. But it’s all very vague. We’ve tried to persuade her to let us do a profile, but no dice.’
When she came to leave I happened to be by the door.
‘Mme Shona.’
‘Yes?’
‘You left something,’ I said, ‘unexplained.’
‘In what way?’
‘Certain professions, you said, attracted certain types and that I didn’t look a type you would have expected to find in our business.’
She half smiled. ‘Later I withdrew it. Don’t you remember?’
‘All the same …’
She considered me, then shrugged as if shrugging away an unwelcome familiarity. ‘ In our business as in all there are the professional men who run our affairs with talk of sales, of cash flow, of balance sheets and the like. I did not think you looked one of those.’