Lovers Make Moan

Chapter 18

Threnody

“And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes.”

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How much do you know?” asked Barbara Bourton.

“That is a stock question,” replied Dame Beatrice, “and I will give the appropriate answer. I know all that I need to know. For one thing, I know that Jasper Lynin did not put the fatal dagger among his father’s collection of weapons.”

“You make it sound like an Elizabethan tragedy and I suppose that is what it was.”

“Will you tell me the plot, or shall I tell it to you?”

“Oh, just as you please. I pay you the compliment of believing that by this time you know it all. If you did not, you would hardly have singled me out. There is one thing, though, which I should like to know.”

“Why the anonymous letters suddenly stopped?”

“I see that you are a thought-reader. No wonder you are so successful in your profession.”

“My profession helps, no doubt. The letters stopped because it was fairly obvious who was writing them. I sent her a warning, that is all, and she was sensible enough to accept it.”

“Is it of any use to ask—?”

“I shall name no names. There were two possible candidates, both unattractive, both, at the beginning of rehearsals, unhappy, but, before the letters were written, one had recovered her spirits, the other, I am sure, had not. You may or may not know that Mr Rinkley, as well as yourself and the two young girls, came to me for comfort and advice.”

“Rinkley? Had he received one of the letters?”

“More than one, he gave me to understand.”

“Oh, well, there is only one unattractive woman—you did say she was unattractive, didn’t you?—who would have written nasty letters to Rinkley, and that woman was not Emma Lynn.”

“Shall we leave it at that?”

“What did the letters accuse him of?—not paying his gambling debts to my husband? He should have ignored the letters. You can’t be had up for so-called debts of honour, and, whatever his faults, Donald didn’t employ strong-arm men to frighten or bash people into paying up. A properly conducted turf accountant’s business doesn’t need to go in for that sort of thing. It covers itself as it goes along. So, if the letters were not about gambling, they must have had to do with the play and that means Robina Lester.”

“When did you first realise that young Jasper Lynn was in love with you?” asked Dame Beatrice abruptly.

“Or thought he was. They get over it very quickly and easily, you know, although it can be a nuisance and a responsibility while it lasts—or so I’ve always discovered.”

“But Jasper got over it neither quickly nor easily, did he?”

“You can’t blame me for that. I’m sure I gave him no encouragement.”

“I seldom apportion blame. Let me hear the evidence for the defence. A woman of your experience could have put a stop to the affair as soon as you realised what was happening. Why did you not do so?”

“Oh, please! It never developed into an affair! It wasn’t until the very end that I knew what he was feeling, and then it was too late to do anything.”

“But at the rehearsals—?”

“Oh, those rehearsals! Really, Dame Beatrice, you have no idea how unutterably tedious and boring they were. And to have to use one’s voice all the time in the open air and in the evenings at that, with all the mist coming up from the bay and some idiotic bird trilling away in the trees! If it hadn’t been for Tom, I would have thrown up the part. I only took it on because the play gave us a chance to be alone together occasionally in those woods.”

“Ah, yes. ‘Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me, and tune his merry note unto the sweet bird’s throat.’ ”

“Good gracious, Tom isn’t a gamekeeper, even if he does breed dogs! Neither am I Lady Chatterley. There was nothing improper in our encounters, I assure you. There were far too many people round and about, for one thing, for us to take any risks.”

“There was certainly one small and very inquisitive person to bear witness to the proceedings, so your circumspection was justified and I apologise for my lapsus linguae. I intended no odious comparisons. May we return to the matter in hand? It is serious enough, in all conscience. You must surely have been aware, very early on, that Jasper Lynn was infatuated with you. Boys of his age are adept at hiding some of their feelings, but the blind adoration of a beloved object is not among these.”

Barbara was silent for a full minute; then she said, “I don’t suppose you know this, but in the read-through of the play I was cast as Helena, not Hermia, and so I did not appear in the first scene until nobody was left on-stage except Emma and Tom. I knew that a gangling adolescent had been chosen as Egeus and my only concern was that he was hardly likely to be convincing in the part. As to his being billed as Emma’s father, well, I was thankful that they were only to play the opening scene together and that I didn’t have to appear with him, but when Emma turned down the part of Hermia and it was wished on me, the ludicrous aspect struck me all over again. It became embarrassing, though, when Brian Yorke, never the soul of tact, pulled the boy up in mid-speech in one of the early rehearsals.

“ ‘Look, Jasper, darling boy,’ he said, ‘you are suggesting that Barbara must either be put to death or become a nun if she doesn’t carry out your wishes. I realise that, left to your natural inclinations, you would not want either of these things to happen, but you are playing a part, not indulging in a visit to the Hesperides. Do pay attention to what is going on. Back to “With cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart”, and look daggers at Tom when you say it and then look at Barbara as though you’d like to give her a thrashing. All right, then. Now, please, everybody, put some pep in it. This scene sets the whole play moving.’ It was only then that I realised the boy had been making sheep’s eyes at me.”

“I can guess the next bit,” said Dame Beatrice. “The boy came to you at the end of the rehearsal and abased himself for making you conspicuous. You, I suppose, feeling sorry for him, gave him a kiss and obtained a response which, as a beautiful and experienced woman, you ought to have foreseen and allowed for.”

“I was never more astonished in my life. To me he was just an abashed and awkward schoolboy and suddenly to find myself locked in his arms and having to listen to the kind of stuff that would have made Antony and Cleopatra turn in their graves with embarrassment—well, it was not only ludicrous; it was quite alarming.”

The story unfolded. Dame Beatrice listened and decided to keep any questions unasked, if possible, until the narrative came to an end. Jasper had written a letter couched in the humblest and most contrite terms begging forgiveness ‘for my unpardonable conduct’, promising that he would ‘never again precipitate such a situation’, but offering ‘eternal homage and beseeching you to grant me the benison of your friendship’.

“After that,” continued Barbara, “I must say that, apart from adoring glances from him in the first scene, nothing happened because he was revising for his examinations, so, as he had no more speeches, he did not stay for the last scenes but went straight home to study. There was no fear, I mean, of his following Tom and me into the woods, or anything of that sort.” Barbara went on to say that the rehearsals continued as smoothly as could be expected considering that Rinkley of the unkind tongue and Donald Bourton of the amorous inclinations were in the cast. Then Deborah and Jonathan gave their cocktail party to which only the married couples were invited. This occurred some weeks before the dress rehearsal and was followed, at the next rehearsal, by a statement from Jasper which, at the time, scarcely registered with Barbara. Helping her off with her coat and laying it reverently on one of the trestle tables which, later, would be used for the props, he asked her how she would like it if he could make her a rich woman.

“ ‘I have the means, you know,’ he told me,” said Barbara. “ ‘You mean your father is a wealthy man? But it will be a long time, I hope, before you inherit anything from him and, when you do, you will think twice before giving any of it away,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, but,’ he said, ‘I’m not talking about my father’s money. I have no expectations there. Everything will go to Emma. That’s the usual arrangement between husbands and wives, isn’t it? It’s not as though I’m his son, you see.’ Well, this meant nothing to me at the time, Dame Beatrice. All I said was that I believed the wife was entitled to claim something when the husband died, and that, in my case, I knew that I was well provided for. ‘Anyway, I am more than likely to die before Donald does,’ I remember saying. He asked me what I would do if I had a lot of money. ‘Oh, I should form my own company and pick the parts I wanted for myself instead of having to wait for offers and then perhaps get saddled with something unsuitable,’ I told him, ‘and have to do the best I could with it.’ ”

“And now you are in a position to realise all your ambitions,” said Dame Beatrice.

“Well, yes, but if I had ever dreamed of how it would come about…”

“Quite; however, one cannot foresee some things.”

“Nobody could have foreseen that Rinkley would be taken ill at the last performance.”

“Oh, I am sure young Jasper had made sure of that. I suspect there had been something added to the drinks Mr Rinkley took back-stage.”

“Some of the men overdid it and not only Rinkley. Sometimes I think that if only Donald hadn’t been so drunk he might have realised, the minute he took it out of his belt, that he’d been given the wrong dagger. We all thought it must have been meant for Rinkley, though, if it wasn’t just somebody’s carelessness. Rinkley wasn’t popular, you know, and he would have known, as Donald should have, that he had the wrong dagger and no harm would have been done.”

“That point was made long ago and disposed of. The substitution of the lethal dagger for the harmless one can only have been made by one of the three persons who carried the properties from the house to the stage. Of these, Brian Yorke would have had no reason to harm any of his actors; the same applies to Marcus Lynn, who had subsidised the production and certainly would not want it disrupted. That leaves young Jasper, who, like a dutiful son, helped to carry down the properties each evening after the costumes had been distributed to the performers. Well, I think we may approach the end of this very unhappy story, don’t you?”

“Before we do, there is something I have to ask you. I see you know it all, and no doubt you have all the evidence you need. What will happen to Tom and Peter and me? The police are still looking for a murderer.”

“I am afraid you will have to tell them your story, but the verdict, now that the identity of the young boy’s body is not in doubt, will be suicide while the mind was disturbed. Where that suicide actually took place is beside the point, in a way, but it was a mistake, perhaps, on the part of one of you, to add the suicide weapon to Mr Lynn’s collection. However, he seems convinced that Jasper himself placed it there and that he killed himself with some other form of cold steel.”

“Yes the police have thought all along that it was murder. I’ve been living in a state of terror. I would have gone to them except for implicating Tom and Peter. Why have you decided it was suicide?”

“The pathologist found three small puncture marks on the front of the body and suggested that suicide was at least as likely as murder. Suicides are on record as being hesitant and experimental before they pluck up the courage to deal themselves le coup de grâce. Mr Lynn’s reference to his son’s written intention to become a Buddhist monk has been taken as evidence of unsound mind. That seems to have clinched the matter.”

“So what happens now?”

“Nothing, except that you are going to tell me the rest of the story. The suicide, I suppose, took place here in your house.”

The rest of the story was soon told. After his parents had gone to Italy and he himself was supposed to have joined his friends for the touring holiday in France, Jasper had turned up at the Bourtons’ house to find Barbara still clearing up in preparation for putting the property up for sale and moving to London.

“I didn’t recognise him until he spoke,” she said. “There was this completely bald object dressed in T-shirt and jeans and carrying what looked like a cricket bag and I was alone in the house because it was past half-past eight in the evening and my maid had given me my dinner at seven, washed up and gone home. She was the only one of Donald’s household that I had kept on. Well, I thought at first that the boy might have found out that the house was empty, except for me, and was up to no good, and I was about to slam the door on him when he spoke.

“ ‘It’s Jasper,’ he said. ‘I say, the hot water at our place has conked. Could you let me have a bath?’

“He sounded perfectly normal and sensible, so, of course, I let him in and asked what he had done with his hair. He said he had decided to turn Buddhist and go to a monastery in Tibet.

“ ‘I thought you were going to France,’ I said. ‘Oh, you can have a bath, of course. First floor, at the top of the stairs. What about towels?’

“He pointed to the bag and said he had brought towels. Then he said, ‘Barbara, will you kiss me goodbye? I promise not to take any advantage’.

“I said, ‘You’re not really thinking of going to Tibet, are you?’

“He said he had considered it, but he did not think the Buddhists would accept him. ‘They don’t believe in killing things,’ he said. Even then, Dame Beatrice, it didn’t dawn on me what he meant.”

“That he had changed over the daggers so that your husband killed himself? Did you never think of Jasper in that connection? Did his hints of making you rich and independent convey nothing to you?”

“I solemnly swear to you that nothing of the sort ever crossed my mind. Oh, I knew the poor boy was going through a bad time about me. It had happened before. I recognised all the symptoms.”

“ ‘Thou, thou (young Jasper) thou has given her rhymes. And interchang’d love-tokens with my child. Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung, With feigning voice, verses of feigning love,’ ” said Dame Beatrice. “That kind of thing, I suppose.”

“There wasn’t much feigning about it, but I thought it would soon die a natural death.”

“Instead of which, the poor youth died a most unnatural one. Well, he said he had towels. I suppose he had the dagger in his bag, not towels. What then?”

“Upstairs he went and I went on sorting out Donald’s papers, which is what I’d been doing when Jasper came, and I forgot all about him until I got tired of the job and decided it was time for my bedtime drink and my bed. It was then I remembered Jasper and realised that he had not looked in to say goodnight. I thought he had decided not to disturb me again and had slipped off home.

“ ‘And a fine old mess I expect the bathroom is in,’ I thought, knowing what men, and particularly young ones, are like. I went upstairs, found the bathroom door shut and, under the crack of the door, I saw that the light was still on.

“I called out, ‘Jasper, are you all right?’ There was no answer, so I called out again and then I tried the door. It was not locked, so I opened it a little way and took a look.

“Well, Dame Beatrice, I didn’t faint, although everything swam round me for a minute. Then I ran downstairs to the telephone and rang up Tom. ‘I’ve got Jasper Lynn here and he’s killed himself, and the bath is full of blood,’ I said.

“Well, Tom was wonderful. He brought Peter with him and when he had been upstairs, leaving Peter downstairs with me, he said, ‘We can’t have you implicated in this. Don’t worry. I know what to do. This has got to look like a skinhead gang business. Lucky he had shaved his head. We’ll have to give it an hour or two until the coast is clear. I’ve let the water out and I’ll clean the bath and get rid of the dagger. He will have a key in his jeans pocket, so Peter will slip along to Lynn’s place and put the dagger among Lynn’s swords and things, and then we’ll all have a good strong snifter before we take the poor kid down to the harbour.’ ”

Rosamund, proud of her achievements in reading, had picked up her father’s discarded newspaper and was perusing it slowly and with diligence.

“What’s un-bal-anced mind?” she asked. Simon answered,

“It’s a state of mental instability brought about by emotional stress which has upset the anti-depressant factors in mens sana, thus over-weighting the normal equilibrium of the cerebellum and culminating in felo de se.”

Rosamund looked reproachfully at him and said: “When I ask Mrs Gavin to tell me things, she tells me things properly. Why don’t you tell me things properly, Daddy, when I ask you?”

“Because I’m a horrible man, I suppose.”

Edmund turned to his mother.

“Daddy’s a horrible man. He drinks all the beer,” he said.

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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release— v1, html]

[April 20, 2007]