The hunt for Sonya Dufrette

R. T. Raichev
1

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

A death that is yet to take place but is believed to have happened some twenty years earlier? Antonia was to think afterwards that it was the kind of ingenious idea crime writers played around with in their idle hours, while luxuriating in a hot bath, or scanning the Times obituaries, beguiled by the seeming impossibility of it, but later discarded as too fanciful, not really worth working through and weaving a whole novel around.

It was 28th July. In the evening, her first back in London since she had returned from her walking tour in Germany’s Black Forest, her son and daughter-in-law paid her a visit, bringing with them her beloved granddaughter Emma. Antonia was delighted to see them. She was also glad of the diversion. Something had been troubling her the whole day – she had felt inexplicable twinges of anxiety, the odd sensation of standing under a dark cloud. Once or twice she had even felt like crying.

Emma seemed to have grown bigger in her absence, as bright and happy a child as could be, looking enchanting in her black shirt and baggy blue trousers, her golden curls peeping from under a black beret.

‘Look at her. She’s destined for the catwalk,’ David said.

‘No way,’ Bethany, her daughter-in-law, said. ‘She’ll be a writer, like Granny.’ Bethany was a former model and strikingly beautiful. David had met her four years before, in Cannes, where he had been sent by Tatler on a photographic assignment. Bethany was disillusioned with the whole pret-a-porter business and regarded the two years she had devoted to it as wasted.

‘One book does not a writer make,’ said Antonia with a smile. ‘Still, sweet of you to say so.’

‘Why-tah!’ Emma cried and banged her fists on the table. ‘Why-tah!’ She banged them again.

‘Yes. A writer, like Granny. Don’t do that, sweetheart… How is the new book going?’

‘Very slowly. Not well. Don’t ask.’ Antonia poured out tea and distributed pieces of Bakewell tart. She hadn’t been able to write a single word the whole day.

‘Gwanna!’ Emma cried. Antonia hugged her.

‘Aren’t detective stories -’ Bethany broke off.

Antonia looked at her. ‘Easier to write? Because they are easier to read? Well, they aren’t.’

‘Actually they are extremely hard to do,’ David said. ‘The kind my mother writes. Mystifying and enlightening at the same time. Having to play fair. Trying to be original. That’s probably the hardest – given that every trick has been done.’ He turned towards his mother. ‘That’s correct, isn’t it?’

‘Pretty much. At any rate no one thinks in terms of tricks any more. At least no one admits to it.’

‘You do want to get out of the library, don’t you?’ Bethany said. She put Bakewell tart in Emma’s mouth.

‘Well, I love the library dearly, but, yes, I would very much prefer to be able to write full-time.’

Antonia had for several years been librarian at the Military Club in St James’s. David went on, ‘As libraries go, that is the place to be – a highly desirable address within striking distance of Clarence House. Watering hole to the Great and the Good.’

‘And the not so good,’ Antonia said.

David gasped in mock horror. ‘You don’t mean there are old boys who misbehave?’

‘Well, somebody was found entertaining a young friend in his room – it turned out they had met only an hour earlier in Piccadilly.’

‘Ah, those military types – notoriously starved of affection. The Queen Mum used to visit some of her old chums there, didn’t she, while she could still get about with a stick? Wasn’t it suggested that she had a beau at the club, some not-so-moth-eaten commodore?’

‘Can’t say. Before my time.’

David had visited his mother at the club and loved every minute of it. He described it as an edifice designed exclusively for manly, or rather, gentlemanly habitation in the Edwardian manner. One walked into a haze of costly cigar smoke – the ‘heathen’s frankincense’. (He claimed he had actually heard one of the club members call it that.) The polished parquet floors were the colour of best-quality halvah and they had been covered with Persian rugs in soft greys, greens and muted yellows – slightly murky London shades. Oak-panelled walls. Winged armchairs. Revolving bookcases. Spittoons – had Beth ever seen a spittoon? (She hadn’t.) The coffee had been excellent – real Turkish coffee – so had the chocolate eclairs.

‘Nobody spits,’ Antonia pointed out. ‘They use them as ashtrays.’

‘The walls are covered with Spy cartoons and ancient royal photographs. Lord and Lady Mountbatten in the most incredible Ruritanian-looking robes. You know the one? Edwina looks pencil-thin, freakishly thin, almost anorexic

‘Was she a model?’ Bethany asked.

‘No, my sweet. She was a vicereine. She had affairs with Nehru and people. They also have the Goddesses cycle. Where did they get them? I mean Madame Yevonde’s thirties society ladies dressed up as goddesses. Lady Rattendone as Euterpe, Lady Diana Cooper as Aurora, Mrs Syrie Maugham as Artemis – it is the most unselfconscious high camp I’ve ever seen!’

‘Colonel Haslett bought them at an auction at Christie’s. Colonel Haslett is my boss,’ Antonia explained with a smile. ‘He’s at least eighty-five.’

‘I’d love to come again and take photos at the club. A la recherche du temps perdu kind of cycle. The old boys look like extras in a Merchant-Ivory film. Hairy tweeds and regimental ties. Some of them creaked alarmingly as they moved. Too good to be true. Must do it before they start kicking their respective buckets. You’ve noticed of course how they read The Times?’

‘They go to the obituaries first. Well, after a certain age one does, I suppose.’

‘Have you had any deaths recently?’ David suddenly asked. ‘I mean among resident members?’

Antonia frowned. ‘Several, yes.’

‘Your friend, the intellectual Major, no doubt suspects foul play? What was his name? My mother has an admirer,’ he told Bethany.

‘I have nothing of the sort.’ Antonia felt herself reddening.

‘Yes, you have. What was his name?’

‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Come on. I was there. I saw him making sheep’s eyes at you. He was chatting you up. All that rigmarole about murder mysteries resembling baroque opera was only a pretext to get your attention. He must know you’ve written a murder mystery.’

There was a pause. ‘He was right, actually,’ Antonia said. ‘Sex and power, jealousy and rage, despair, menace, violent death – you find them in baroque opera and in most murder mysteries. Especially violent death. That was clever of him.’

‘Death,’ Emma said. Amazingly she pronounced that one word perfectly.

‘What was his name? No, don’t tell me. Penderby. Major Horace Penderby.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s Payne. Hugh Payne.’ Antonia found herself looking at Emma. For some reason her heart had started beating fast.

‘Major Payne. Oh yes. You fancy him too, don’t you? Well, he was a presentable sort of chap. Better-looking than Dad. Not as ancient as the others. Can’t be more than fifty-three or four. They say that fifty is the new forty.’

‘If fifty is the new forty, then forty’s the new thirty – which means twenty is the new ten, right?’ Bethany said. ‘Which means that I am fourteen. You are married to a girl of fourteen and have fathered a daughter by her. You’ve broken the law.’

‘No, no, it doesn’t work that way at all… What is Major Payne? Divorced? Bachelor?’

‘Widower. His wife died last year.’

‘There you are.’

‘What do you mean – there you are?’

‘Has he got any children?’

‘A son. In the Guards.’

‘Forgot to tell you. I saw Dad the other day. He didn’t seem at all well.’

‘Oh? What’s the matter? Did he tell you?’

‘I was on the top of a bus in Oxford Street.’

‘Was Sally – ’ Antonia bit her lip. It still hurt, each time she recalled that her husband had left her for a young woman of Bethany’s age. What was it now? Nearly two years ago.

‘No, she wasn’t with him. He was walking by himself. He looked pale and haggard – older. I tried to phone later but no one answered.’

‘I wonder if – ’ Antonia began. If Sally’s left him, she was going to say but didn’t. Well, she’d always maintained that this kind of thing wouldn’t last. Richard, after all, was old enough to be Sally’s father. She felt a thrill at the thought that she’d been proved right, and she didn’t like it. She told herself it wouldn’t do to gloat – that giving way to schadenfreude was beneath her.

‘Do they allow women in the club?’ Bethany asked.

‘They didn’t use to, but now they do. Wives and sisters and, I suspect, mistresses. One can’t always tell which is which.’

‘Don’t mistresses have a certain… air?’ David said.

‘I don’t know. I may be entirely wrong, but I think they tend to laugh a lot. Exhilaration, exultation – or nerves. I don’t know. There are widows of club members too. One of them, Mrs Vollard, relic of Admiral Vollard RN, was rumoured to have started a secret brothel on the premises. It’s an apocryphal story. Part of the club mythology.’

‘Hookers or rent boys?’ Bethany said.

They all laughed.

Afterwards Antonia was to remember what a happy occasion it had been up till that moment. Emma had stomped around the place, keeping up her prattle of separate words, kissing her grandmother with exaggerated affection and allowing, nay demanding, to be kissed in return, being charming to Antonia’s two cats and generally lovable. Then, suddenly, and without the slightest provocation, it turned to tempestuous tears, shrieks, ugly anger and violence. Reaching out, she swept two teacups off the table, causing them to smash. She then kicked the pieces.

Emma’s face had become dark and suffused, the usually friendly eyes flashed alien and hostile. In the stunned silence that followed she picked up a slice of Bakewell tart from the cake stand and flung it at her grandmother. It hit Antonia on the chest and disintegrated on her lap. Never having seen this side of her granddaughter before, Antonia was appalled and distressed.

‘She’s just tired, it’s nothing,’ Bethany said in a matter-of-fact voice, picking Emma up, only to have her face hammered at by two vicious little fists. David intervened at once, taking Emma away and slapping her bottom lightly. The child screeched and jabbered and tried to claw at his face, writhing like a snake the while. Then she started sobbing uncontrollably. Despite their reassuring smiles, Antonia could see that David and Bethany were discomposed and puzzled. Soon after, they left. She felt shaken up by Emma’s outburst, more than she thought possible. She had imagined an accusatory glint in Emma’s eyes. For a moment Emma had reminded her of somebody…

Antonia’s mind became clouded by a certain unidentifiable sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. She had the very palpable feeling of – well, the only way to describe it was, of something having been unleashed.

She knew it was absurd of her to feel like that and sought a rational explanation. No doubt the tantrum had been the sort that three-year-olds experience every day. She was overreacting – she was being neurotic, getting things out of all proportion. She was still smarting from her divorce. Her confidence had been dealt a blow. She hadn’t recovered yet. The trip abroad hadn’t really done the trick. She was in a fragile state. She was still feeling tired after her long plane journey. (There had been a four-hour delay and they had arrived at Heathrow at three in the morning.) She had also drunk champagne on the plane, which she shouldn’t have done. She was a poor drinker. She should have resisted the Roscoes’ well-meant attempts to cheer her up. And why had she needed cheering up? Well, she had been depressed. She had burst into tears. That hadn’t had anything to do with her marriage. She had convinced herself that she could never possibly put pen to paper again.

‘Unleashed,’ she said aloud. ‘Nonsense.’

But the dark cloud wouldn’t go away. Tired. That was it. Terribly tired. That was the reason. When she was tired she became subject to odd fancies, like a pregnant woman – a proclivity she did not always succeed in keeping well under control. It had all happened before. The fact that she was going back to work tomorrow morning and had to write a report for the club committee by the end of the week didn’t help either.

Antonia sat down and listened to a Haydn sonata. She managed to persuade herself that that was the salve she had needed. (Haydn’s common sense had ‘penetrated’, was how she thought of it.) She then glanced at the twenty pages of the novel she had started writing and thought the whole thing implausible in the extreme – rather silly, actually. She had got the premise of self-imposed amnesia – of repressed memory that turns out to be false memory – from an article she had read in The Times, but she didn’t seem to have been able to do much with it. Did people behave like that? Did people think like that? Did that sort of thing happen to people? Why had she chosen a subject she knew nothing about?

Exasperated, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pushed the pages in. The bottom drawer was the one she opened only when she wanted to get rid – no, to half get rid of something. It contained various discarded papers. She was waiting for it to get full before she made a bonfire in the back yard and burnt its contents. (Not an entirely rational thing to do, but then she had to admit she wasn’t an entirely rational person.)

The drawer wouldn’t shut. There was something at the back that had got jammed. After two attempts, she gave up, leaving the drawer gaping. She refused to take that as a sign, though she did imagine it might be a sign. She vaguely wondered what it was that had caused the jamming but felt reluctant to investigate.

‘Hate writing but love having written. Dorothy Parker said that. Well, not true – I hate both,’ Antonia told her cats as she fed them a little while later. ‘I am afraid this is a writer’s block from which I may never recover. My first novel will also be my last. I may be going mad too.’

The cats looked back at her with indifference and licked their whiskers.

She had a cup of hot milk, took two sleeping pills, turned off all the lights and went to bed.

Antonia hadn’t expected to sleep well and she didn’t.

She woke up in the middle of the night, feeling hot, drowsy and confused, her heart thumping in her chest. She turned on the bedside lamp and reached out for her glass of water. Once more she had a sense of foreboding. She also felt consumed by guilt. And this wasn’t the familiar dread of facing a lonely future, nor the guilty feeling she had had over her failed marriage. She was conscious of having done something appalling. Something that had resulted in disaster – no, not the disaster of losing a husband to a younger woman, something worse. Much worse.

Falling back on her pillow and shutting her eyes, Antonia found herself remembering, of all things, a production of Eliot’s The Family Reunion which she had seen a couple of years back. In it the Eumenides had been presented as children, which she had thought an extremely spooky and effective decision on the part of the director. One didn’t expect children to look and sound menacing, accusatory, slyly knowing

…

Violence and children… one particular child… something unresolved… a death that could have been prevented… something she had allowed to happen… a little girl… no, not Emma…

As she drifted into an uneasy sleep, she heard a man’s voice hum, ‘When I am King, Dilly, Dilly, You shall be Queen…’

She saw a doll floating on a river… blood coming out of a hollow in the middle of an ancient tree… a Mary Poppins-like figure disappearing into the sky…