The Skull Beneath The Skin

CHAPTER ONE

There could be no doubt about it, the new name-plate was crooked. Cordelia had no need to adopt Bevis's expedient of dodging through the mid-morning traffic which cluttered Kingly Street and squinting at it through a dazzle of grinding delivery vans and taxis to recognize stark mathematical fact; the neat bronze oblong, so carefully designed and so expensive, was half an inch out of true. Lopsided as it was, it looked, she thought, despite the simplicity of its wording, both pretentious and ridiculous, a fitting advertisement of irrational hope and ill-advised enterprise.

Pryde's Detective Agency

(Third Floor) Prop: Cordelia Gray

Had she been superstitious, she might have believed that Bernie's unquiet spirit was protesting against the new plaque with the deletion of his name. And indeed, it had seemed at the time symbolic, the final obliteration of Bernie at her hands. She had never considered changing the name of the Agency; while it remained in being it would always be Pryde's. But it had become increasingly irksome to be asked by her clients, disconcerted as much by her sex as by her youth, 'But I thought I would be seeing Mr Pryde.' They might as well know from the start that there was now only one proprietor and she a female.

Bevis rejoined her at the door, his pretty, mobile face a parody of desolation, and said:

'I measured it carefully from the ground, honestly, Miss Gray.'

'I know. The pavement must be uneven. It's my fault. We should have bought a spirit level.'

But she had been trying to limit expenditure from the petty cash, ten pounds a week kept in the battered cigarette tin inherited from Bernie with its picture of the battle of Jutland, from which money seemed to drain away by a mysterious process unrelated to actual expenditure. It had been only too easy to accept the assurance of Bevis that he was handy with a screwdriver, forgetting that, for Bevis, any job was preferable to the one he was actually supposed to be doing. He said:

'If I close my left eye and hold my head like this it looks all right.'

'But we can't rely on a succession of one-eyed, wry-necked clients, Bevis.'

Glancing at Bevis's face, which had now fallen into an extreme of despair which would not have been inappropriate to the announcement of an atomic attack, Cordelia felt an obscure desire to comfort him for his own incompetence. One of the disconcerting aspects of being an employer of staff, a role for which she increasingly felt herself almost wholly unsuited, was this over-sensitivity to their feelings coupled with a vague sense of guilt. This was the more irrational since, strictly speaking, she didn't directly employ either Bevis or Miss Maudsley. Both were hired from Miss Feeley's employment agency on a weekly basis when the Agency's case-load warranted it. There was seldom competition for their services; both were invariably and suspiciously available when asked for. Both gave her honesty, conscientious timekeeping and a fierce loyalty; both would, no doubt, have also given her an efficient secretarial service if that had lain in their power. Both added to her anxieties, since she knew that the failure of the Agency would be almost as traumatic for them as for her. Miss Maudsley would suffer the more. She was a gentle, sixty-two-year-old, rector's sister, eking out her pension in a bed-sitting-room in South Kensington, whose gentility, age, incompetence and virginity had made her the butt of the countless typing-pools through which she had drifted since her brother's death. Bevis, with his facile, slightly venal charm, was better equipped to survive in the London jungle. He was supposed to be a dancer working as a temporary typist while resting, an inappropriate euphemism when applied to such a restless boy, perpetually fidgeting in his chair or pirouetting on tiptoe, fingers splayed, eyes widened and alarmed as if poised for flight. He was certificated to type thirty words a minute by an obscure secretarial school long since defunct, but Cordelia reminded herself that even they hadn't guaranteed his proficiency to undertake minor jobs as a handyman.

He and Miss Maudsley were unexpectedly compatible, and a great deal more chat went on in the outer office between the bouts of inexpert typing than Cordelia would have expected from two such discordant personalities, denizens, she would have thought, of such alien worlds. Bevis poured out his domestic and professional tribulations liberally laced with inaccurate and occasionally scurrilous theatrical gossip. Miss Maudsley applied to this bewildering world her own mixture of innocence, High Anglican theology, rectory morality and common sense. Life in the – outer office became very cosy at times, but Miss Maudsley had old-fashioned views on the proper distinction to be made between employer and employed and the inner room where Cordelia worked was sacrosanct.

Suddenly Bevis cried out:

'Oh God, it's Tomkins!'

A small black and white kitten had appeared at the doorway, shaken one exploratory paw with deceptive insouciance, stretched its tail rigid, then shivered with ecstatic apprehension and darted under a Post Office van and out of sight. Bevis, wailing, fled in pursuit. Tomkins was one of the Agency's failures, having been repudiated by a spinster of that name who had employed Cordelia to find her missing black kitten with a white eye patch, two white paws and a striped tail. Tomkins precisely fulfilled the specification, but his putative mistress had immediately known him for an impostor. Having rescued him from imminent starvation on a building site behind Victoria station they could hardly abandon him and he now lived in the outer office with a dirt tray, cushioned basket, and access to the roof via a partly opened window for his nightly excursions. He was a drain on resources, not so much because of the rising cost of cat food – although it was a pity that Miss Maudsley had encouraged an addiction to tastes beyond their means by providing the most expensive tin on the market for his first meal and that Tomkins, although in general a stupid cat, could apparently read labels – but because Bevis wasted too much time playing with him, tossing a ping-pong ball or drawing a rabbit's foot on string across the office floor with cries of:

'Oh look, Miss Gray! Isn't he a clever leaping beastie?'

The clever leaping beastie, having caused chaos among the traffic in Kingly Street, now streaked into the rear entrance of a pharmacy with Bevis in noisy pursuit. Cordelia guessed that neither kitten nor boy was likely to reappear for some time. Bevis picked up new friends as obsessively as others pick up litter, and Tomkins would be a great introducer. Oppressed by the realization that Bevis's morning was now fated to be almost entirely unproductive, Cordelia was aware of a lethargic disinclination for any further effort herself. She stood against the jamb of the doorway, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the unseasonable warmth of the late September sun. Distancing herself by an effort of will from the grind and clamour of the street, the pervading smell of petrol, the clatter of passing feet, she played with the temptation, which she knew she would resist, to walk away from it all, leaving the lopsided plaque as a memorial to her efforts to keep faith with the dead Bernie and his impossible dream.

She supposed that she ought to be relieved that the Agency was beginning to make a reputation for something, even if it were only for finding lost pets. Undoubtedly there was a need for such a service – and one in which she suspected they had a monopoly – and the clients, tearful, desperate, outraged by what they saw as the callous indifference of the local CID, never haggled at the size of the bill, and paid more promptly than Cordelia suspected they might have done for the return of a relative. Even when the Agency's efforts had been unsuccessful and Cordelia had to present her account with apologies, it was invariably paid without demur. Perhaps the owners were motivated by the natural human need at a time of bereavement to feel that something had been done, however unlikely that something, to achieve success. But frequently there were successes. Miss Maudsley, in particular, had a persistence in door-to-door inquiries coupled with an almost uncanny empathy with the feline mind that had restored at least half a dozen cats, damp, half-starved and feebly mewing, to their ecstatic owners, while occasionally exposing the perfidy of those animals who had been living a double life and had transferred more or less permanently to their second home. She managed to conquer her timidity when in pursuit of cat thieves, and on Saturday mornings walked purposefully through the rowdy exuberance and half-submerged terrors of London's street markets as if under divine protection, which no doubt she felt herself to be.

But Cordelia wondered from time to time what poor, ambitious, pathetic Bernie would have thought about the debasement of his dream-child. Lulled into a trance-like peace by the warmth and the sun, Cordelia recalled with startling clarity that confident, over-loud voice: 'We've got a gold-mine here, partner, if once we get started.' She was glad that he couldn't know how small the nuggets and how thin the seam.

A voice, quiet, masculine and authoritative, broke into her reverie.

'That name-plate's crooked.'

'I know.'

Cordelia opened her eyes. The voice was deceptive: he was older than she had expected, she guessed a little over sixty. Despite the heat of the day he was wearing a tweed jacket, well tailored but old with leather patches on the elbows. He wasn't tall, perhaps no more than five feet ten inches, but he stood very upright with an easy, confident stance, almost an elegance, which she sensed concealed an inner wariness, as if he were tensed for a word of command. She wondered if he had once been a soldier. His head was held high and fixed, the grey and somewhat sparse hair brushed smoothly back from a high, creased forehead. The face was long and bony with a dominant nose jutting from cheeks reddened and crossed by broken veins, and a wide, well-shaped mouth. The eyes which scrutinized her (not, she felt, unbenignly) were keen under the bushy eyebrows. The left brow was held higher than the right and she saw that he had a habit of twitching his brows and working the corners of the long mouth; it gave his face a restlessness which was singularly at variance with the stillness of his body and which made it slightly embarrassing for her to meet his eyes. He said:

'Better get the job done properly.'

She watched without speaking while he put down the briefcase he was carrying, took from a pocket a pen and his wallet, found a card, and wrote on the back of it in an upright, rather schoolboyish hand.

Taking the card, Cordelia noted the single name, Morgan, and the telephone number, then turned it over. She read:

Sir George Ralston, Bt., DSO, MC.

So she was right. He had been a soldier. She asked:

'Will he be expensive, this Mr Morgan?'

'Less expensive than making a nonsense. Tell him I gave you his number. He'll charge what the job's worth, no more.'

Cordelia's heart lifted. The lopsided name plaque, gravely surveyed by the critical eye of this unexpected and eccentric knight errant, suddenly seemed to her irresistibly funny, no longer a calamity but a joke. Even Kingly Street was transformed with her mood and became a glittering, sunlit bazaar, pulsating with optimism and life. She almost laughed aloud. Controlling her trembling mouth she said gravely:

'It's very kind of you. Are you a connoisseur of name-plates or just a public benefactor?'

'Some people think I'm a public menace. Actually, I'm a client, that is, if you're Cordelia Gray. Don't people ever tell you…'

Cordelia, unreasonably, was disappointed. Why should she have supposed that he was different from other male clients? She finished the sentence for him:

'That it's an unsuitable job for a woman? They do, and it isn't.'

He said mildly:

'I was going to say, don't they ever tell you that your office is difficult to find? This street's a mess. Half the buildings aren't properly numbered. Too much change of use, I suppose. But the new plate should help when it's properly fixed. Better get it done. Gives a poor impression.'

At that moment Bevis panted up beside them, his curls damp with exertion, the tell-tale screwdriver protruding from his shirt pocket. Holding a richly purring Tomkins against one flushed cheek, he presented his charming delinquency to the newcomer. He was rewarded by a curt, 'A botched job that' and a look which instantly rejected him as officer material. Sir George turned to Cordelia:

'Shall we go up then?'

Cordelia avoided Bevis's eyes, which she guessed were rolling heavenward, and they climbed the narrow, linoleum-covered stairs in single file, Cordelia leading, past the single lavatory and washroom which served all the tenants in the building (she hoped that Sir George wouldn't need to use it) and into the front outer office on the third floor. Miss Maudsley's anxious eyes looked up at them over her typewriter. Bevis deposited Tomkins in his basket (where he at once began washing away the contamination of Kingly Street), gave Miss Maudsley a wide-eyed, admonitory look, and mouthed the word 'client' at her. Miss Maudsley flushed, half rose from her chair, then subsided again and applied herself to painting out an error with a shaking hand. Cordelia led the way into her inner sanctum.

When they were seated she asked:

'Would you like some coffee?'

'Real coffee or ersatz?'

'Well, I suppose you'd call it ersatz. But best quality ersatz.'

'Tea, then, if you have it, preferably Indian. Milk please. No sugar. No biscuits.'

The form of the request was not meant to be offensive. He was used to ascertaining the facts, then asking for what he wanted.

Cordelia put her head outside the door and said 'Tea please' to Miss Maudsley. The tea, when it arrived, would be served in the delicate Rockingham cups which Miss Maudsley had inherited from her mother and had lent to the Agency for the use of special clients only. She had no doubt that Sir George would qualify for the Rockingham.

They faced each other across Bernie's desk. His eyes, grey and keen, inspected her face as if he were an examiner and she a candidate, which in a way she supposed she was. Their sudden, direct and glittering stare, in contrast to the spasmodically grimacing mouth, was disconcerting. He said:

'Why do you call yourself Pryde's?'

'Because the Agency was set up by an ex-Metropolitan policeman, Bernie Pryde. I worked for him for a time as his assistant and then he made me his partner. When he died he left the Agency to me.'

'How did he die?'

The question, sharp as an accusation, struck her as odd, but she answered calmly. 'He cut his wrists.'

She didn't need to close her eyes to see again that remembered scene, garish and sharply outlined as a cinema still. Bernie had lain slumped in the chair in which she now sat, his half-clenched right hand close to the open cutthroat razor, his shrunken left hand, with its scored and gaping wrist, resting palm upwards in the bowl like some exotic sea anemone glimpsed in a rock pool, curling in death its pale and wrinkled tentacles. But no rock pool had ever been so brightly pink. She could smell again the sickly-sweet insistent odour of freshly spilt blood.

'Killed himself, did he?'

His tone lightened. He might have been a golfing partner congratulating Bernie on a well-placed putt, while his quick glance round the office suggested that the action had been in all the circumstances entirely reasonable.

She had no need to see either room through his eyes. What she saw through her own was depressing enough. She and Miss Maudsley had redecorated her office together, painting the walls pale yellow to give an impression of greater light and cleaning the faded carpet with a proprietary liquid; it had dried patchily so that the final impression reminded her of diseased skin. With its newly washed curtains, the room at least looked clean and tidy, too tidy since the absence of clutter suggested no great pressure of work. Every surface was crammed with plants. Miss Maudsley had green fingers and the cuttings she had taken from her own plants and lovingly tended in a variety of oddly shaped receptacles picked up during her forays in the street markets had flourished despite the poor light. The resulting rampant greenery suggested that it had been cunningly deployed to conceal some sinister defect in the structure or decor. Cordelia still used Bernie's old oak desk, could still imagine that she could trace the outline of the bowl in which he had bled away his life, could still identify one particular stain of spilt blood and water. But then there were so many rings, so many stains. His hat, with its upturned brim and grubby ribbon, still hung on the curved wooden coat-stand. No jumble sale would take it and she found herself unable to throw it away. Twice she had taken it as far as the dustbin in the back yard but had been unable to drop it in, finding this final symbolic rejection of Bernie even more personal and traumatic than the exclusion of his name from the name-plaque. If the Agency did finally fail – and she tried not to think what the new rent would be when the lease came up for renewal in three years' time – she supposed that she would still leave the hat hanging there in its pathetic decrepitude for unknown hands to toss with fastidious distaste into the waste-paper basket.

The tea arrived. Sir George waited until Miss Maudsley left. Then, measuring milk carefully into his cup, drop by drop, he said:

'The job I'm offering is a mixture of functions. You'd be part bodyguard, part private secretary, part investigator and part -well, nursemaid. A bit of everything. Not everyone's cup of tea. No knowing how it may turn out.'

'I'm supposed to be a private investigator.'

'No doubt. Shouldn't be too purist In these times. A job's a job. And you could find yourself involved in detection, even in violence, although it doesn't seem likely. Unpleasant but not dangerous. If I thought there was any real risk to my wife or to you I wouldn't be employing an amateur.'

Cordelia said:

'Perhaps you could explain what, exactly, you want me to do.'

He frowned into his tea as if reluctant to begin. But when he did his account was lucid, concise and unhesitating.

'My wife is the actress Clarissa Lisle. You may have heard of her. Most people seem to know of her although she hasn't worked much recently. I am her third husband and we married in June 1978. In July 1980 she was employed to play Lady Macbeth at the Duke of Clarence Theatre. On the third night of the advertised six-month run she received what she saw as a death threat. These threats have continued intermittently ever since.'

He began sipping his tea. Cordelia found herself gazing at him with the anxiety of a child hoping that her offering is acceptable. The pause seemed very long. She asked:

'You said that she saw the first note as threatening. Are you implying that its meaning was ambiguous? What form exactly do these threats take?'

'Typewritten notes. Variety of machines by the look of it. Each communication surmounted by a small drawing of a coffin

or a skull. All are quotations from plays in which my wife has appeared. All the quotations deal with death or dying: the fear of death, the judgement of death, the inevitability of death.'

The reiteration of that numinous word was oppressive. But surely it was in her imagination that he twisted it on his lips with mordant satisfaction? She said:

'But they don't specifically threaten her?'

'She sees this harping on death as threatening. She's sensitive. Actresses have to be I suppose. They need to be liked. This isn't friendly. I have the notes here, the ones she kept. The first ones were, thrown away. You'll need the evidence.'

He unclicked the briefcase and took out a stout manilla envelope. From it he spilled a heap of small sheets of paper and began spreading them over the desk. She recognized the type of paper at once; it was a popular, medium-quality, white writing-paper sold in three sizes with envelopes to match over thousands of stationery counters. The sender had been economical and had selected the smallest size. Each sheet bore a typed quotation surmounted by a small drawing about one inch high of either an up-ended coffin with the initials RIP on the lid or a skull with two crossbones. Neither had required much skill; they were emblems rather than accurate representations. On the other hand, they were drawn with a certain sureness of line and decorative sense which suggested some facility with the pen or, in this case, with a black-tipped ball-point. Under Sir George's bony fingers the white slips of paper with their stark black emblems shifted and rearranged themselves like the cards for some sinister game -hunt the quotation, murderer's snap.

Most of the quotations were familiar, words which would readily come to the mind of anyone reasonably well read in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans who chose to ponder on references in English drama to death and the terror of dying. Even reading them now, truncated and childishly embellished as they were, Cordelia felt their potent and nostalgic power. The majority of them were from Shakespeare and the obvious choices were there. The longest by far – and how could the sender have resisted it? -was Claudio's anguished cry from Measure for Measure:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods; or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world!…

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

It was difficult to interpret that familiar passage as a personal threat; but most of the other quotations could be seen as more directly intimidating, hinting, she thought, at some retribution for real or imagined wrongs.

He that dies pays all debts.

Oh, thou weed!

Who art so lovely fair and smellest so sweet

That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!

Some care had been taken in the choice of illustration. The skull adorned the lines from Hamlet,

Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.

as it did a passage which Cordelia thought might be from John Webster, although she couldn't identify the play.

Being heretofore drown'd in security, You know not how to live, nor how to die; But I have an object that shall startle you, And make you know whither you are going.

But, even allowing for the sensitivity of an actress, it would take a fairly robust egotism to wrench these familiar words from their contexts and apply them to oneself; that, or. a fear of dying so strong as to be morbid. She took a new notebook from her desk drawer and asked: 'How do they arrive?'

'Most come by post in the same type of envelope as the paper and with the address typed. My wife didn't think to keep any of the envelopes. A few were delivered by hand either at the theatre or at our London flat. One was pushed under the dressing-room door during the run of Macbeth. The first half-dozen or so were destroyed – best thing to do with them all in my view. These twenty-three are all we now have. I've numbered them in pencil on the back in the order of receipt as far as my wife can remember and with information about when and how each was delivered.'

'Thank you. That should be helpful. Your wife has played a great deal of Shakespeare?'

'She was a member of the Malvern Repertory Company for three years after she left drama school and played a fair amount then. Less in recent years.'

'And the first of these – which she threw away – came when she was playing Lady Macbeth. What happened?'

'The first one was upsetting, but she told no one about it. Thought it was an isolated bit of malice. She says she can't remember what it said, only that it had the drawing of a coffin. Then a second came and a third and fourth. During the third week of the season my wife kept breaking down and had to be continually prompted. On the Saturday she ran off the stage during the Second Act and her understudy had to take over. It's all a matter of confidence. If you think you're going to dry up – drying is the theatrical jargon I believe – then you dry. She was able to return to the part after a week but it was a struggle to get through the six weeks. After that she was due to appear at Brighton in a revival of one of those thirties murder mysteries, the sort where the ingenue is called Bunty, the hero is Clive and all the men wear long tennis flannels and keep dashing in and out of french windows. Curious affair. Not exactly her kind of part, she's a classical actress, but there aren't a lot of opportunities for middle-aged women. Too many good actresses chasing too few parts, so they tell me. Same thing happened. The first quotation appeared on the morning the play opened and they came at regular intervals thereafter. The play came off after four weeks and my wife's performance may have had something to do with it. She thought so. I'm not so sure. It was a stupid plot, couldn't make sense of if myself. Clarissa didn't act again until she accepted a part in Webster's The White Devil, at Nottingham, Victoria something or other.' 'Vittoria Corombona.'

'Was that it? I was in New York for ten days and didn't see it. But the same thing happened. The first note arrived again on the day the play opened. This time my wife went to the police. Not much joy. They took the notes away, thought about them and brought them back. Sympathetic but not very effective. Made it obvious that they didn't take the death threat seriously. Pointed out that if people are serious about killing, they do it, they don't just threaten. Must say, that was rather my view. They did discover one thing, though. The note which arrived while I was in New York was typed on my old Remington.'

Cordelia said:

'You still haven't explained how you think I can help.'

'Coming to that. This weekend my wife is to play the leading role in an amateur production of The Duchess of Malfi. The play is to be given in Victorian dress and will take place on Courcy Island about two miles off the Dorset coast. The owner of the island, Ambrose Gorringe, has restored the small Victorian theatre which was first built by his great grandfather. I understand that the original Gorringe, who rebuilt the ruined medieval castle, used to entertain the Prince of Wales and his mistress, the actress Lillie Langtry, and the guests used to amuse themselves with amateur theatricals. I suppose the present owner is trying to restore past glories. There was an article in one of the Sunday papers about a year ago describing the island, the restoration of the castle and theatre. You may have seen it.'

Cordelia couldn't recall it. She said:

'And you want me to go to the island and be with Lady Ralston?'

'I hoped to be there myself but that won't be possible. I have a meeting in the West Country which I can't miss. I propose to motor down to Speymouth with my wife early Friday morning and take leave of her at the launch. But she needs someone with her. This performance is important to her. There's to be a revival of the play at Chichester in the spring and if she can regain her confidence she might feel that she can do it. But there's more to it than that. She thinks that the threats may come to a head this weekend, that someone will try to kill her on Courcy Island.'

'She must have some reason for thinking that.'

'Nothing that she can explain. Nothing that would impress the police. Not rational, perhaps. But that's what she feels. She asked me to get you.'

And he had come to get her. Did he always procure for his wife whatever she wanted? She asked again:

'What precisely am I being employed to do, Sir George?'

'Protect her from nuisance. Take any telephone calls which come for her. Open any letters. Check the set before the performance if you get the chance. Be on call at night; that's when she's most nervous. And bring a fresh mind to the question of the messages. Find out, if you can in just three days, who is responsible.'

Before Cordelia could respond to these concise instructions there came again that disconcerting pierce of grey from under the discordant brows

'D'you like birds?'

Cordelia was temporarily nonplussed. She supposed that few people, except those afflicted with a phobia, would admit to not liking birds. They are, after all, one of the most graceful of life's fragile diversions. But she supposed that Sir George was covertly inquiring whether she could recognize a marsh-harrier at fifty yards. She said cautiously:

'I'm not very good at identifying the less common species.'

'Pity. The island's one of the most interesting natural bird sanctuaries in Great Britain, probably the most remarkable of those in private hands, almost as interesting as Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour. Very similar, come to think of it. Courcy has as many rare birds; the blue-eared and Swinhold pheasants as well as Canada geese, black godwits and oyster catchers. Pity you're not interested. Any questions – about the case I mean?'

Cordelia said tentatively:

'If I'm to spend three days with your wife, ought she not to interview me before any decision is made? It's important that she feels she can trust me. She doesn't know me. We haven't even met.'

'Yes you have. That's how she knows she can trust you. She was having tea with a Mrs Fortescue last week when you returned the Fortescue cat – Solomon I think the brute's called. Apparently you found him within thirty minutes of beginning the search so your bill was correspondingly small. Mrs Fortescue is devoted to the animal. You could have charged treble. She wouldn't have queried it. That impressed my wife.'

Cordelia said:

'We're rather expensive. We have to be. But we are honest.'

She remembered the drawing-room in Eaton Square, a feminine room if femininity implies softness and luxury; a cluttered, cosy repository of silver-framed photographs, an over-lavish tea on a low table in front of the Adam fireplace, too many flowers conventionally arranged. Mrs Fortescue, incoherent with relief and joy, had introduced her guest to Cordelia as a matter of form but her voice, muffled in Solomon's fur, had been indistinct and Cordelia hadn't caught the name. But the impression had been definite. The visitor had sat very still in her armchair beside the fireplace, one thin leg thrown over the other, heavily ringed hands resting on the arms. Cordelia recalled yellow hair intricately piled and wound above a tall forehead, a small, bee-stung mouth, and immense eyes, deep-set but with heavy, almost swollen, lids. She had seemed to impose on the lush conformity of the room a hieratic and angular grace, a distinction which, despite the plainness of the formal suede suit, hinted at some histrionic or eccentric individuality. She had gravely bent her head and watched her friend's effusions with a half-mocking smile. Despite her stillness there had been no impression of peace. Cordelia said:

'I didn't recognize your wife but I remember her very well.'

'And you'll take the job?'

'Yes, I'll take it.'

He said without embarrassment:

'Rather different from finding lost cats. Mrs Fortescue told my wife what you charge per day. This will be higher, I suppose.' Cordelia said:

'The daily rate is the same whatever the job. The final bill depends on the time taken, whether I have to use either of my staff, and the level of expenses. These can sometimes be high. But as I'll be a guest on the island, there will be no hotel bills. When do you want me to arrive?'

'The launch from Courcy – it's called Shearwater – will be at Speymouth jetty to meet the nine thirty-three from Waterloo. Your ticket's in this envelope. My wife has telephoned to let Mr Gorringe know that she's bringing a secretary-companion to help her with various odd jobs during the weekend. You'll be expected.'

So Clarissa Lisle had been confident that she would take the job. And why not? She had taken it. And she was apparently equally confident of being able to get her way with Ambrose Gorringe. Her excuse for including a secretary in the party was surely rather thin and Cordelia wondered how far it had been believed. To arrive for a country-house weekend accompanied by one's private detective was permissible for royalty, but in any less elevated guest showed a lack of confidence in one's host, while to bring one incognito might reasonably be regarded as a breach of etiquette. It wasn't going to be easy to protect Miss Lisle without betraying that she was there under false pretences, a discovery which would hardly be agreeable for either her host or fellow guests. She said:

'I need to know who else will be on the island and anything you can tell me about them.'

'There's not much I can tell. There'll be about one. hundred people on the island by Saturday afternoon when the cast and invited audience arrive. But the house party is small. My wife, of course, with Tolly – Miss Tolgarth – her dresser. Then my wife's stepson, Simon Lessing, will be there. He's a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, the son of Clarissa's second husband who was drowned in August 1977. He wasn't happy with the relatives who were his guardians so my wife decided to take him on. I'm not sure why he's invited, music's his interest. Clarissa probably thought it was time he met more people. He's a shy boy. Then there's her cousin, Roma Lisle. Used to be a schoolmistress but now keeps a bookshop somewhere in north London. Unmarried; aged about forty-five. I've only met her twice. I think she may be bringing her partner with her but, if so, I can't tell you who he is. And you'll meet the drama critic Ivo Whittingham. He's an old friend of my wife. He's supposed to be doing a piece about the theatre and the performance for one of the colour magazines. Ambrose Gorringe will be there, of course. And there are three servants: the buder, Munter, and his wife and Oldfield, who is the boatman and general factotum. I think that's all.' 'Tell me about Mr Gorringe.'

'Gorringe has known my wife since childhood. Both their fathers were in the diplomatic. He inherited the island from his uncle in 1977, when he was spending a year abroad. Something to do with tax avoidance. He came back to the UK in 1978 and has spent the last three years restoring the castle and looking after the island. Middle-aged. Unmarried. Read history at Cambridge I believe. Authority on the Victorians. I know no harm of him.'

Cordelia said:

'There's one last question I have to ask. Your wife apparently fears for her life, so much so that she is reluctant to be on Courcy Island without protection. Is there any one of that company whom she has reason to fear, reason to suspect?'

She could see at once that the question was unwelcome, perhaps because it forced him to acknowledge what he had implied but never stated, that his wife's fear for her life was hysterical and unreal. She had demanded protection and he was providing it. But he didn't think it was necessary; he believed neither in the danger nor in the means he was employing to reassure her. And now some part of his mind was repelled by the thought that his wife's host and her fellow guests were to be under secret surveillance. He had done what his wife had asked of him, but he didn't like himself any the better for it. He said curtly:

'I think you can put that idea out of your head. My wife has no reason to suspect any of the house party of wishing to harm her, no reason in the world.'

CHAPTER TWO

Nothing more of importance was said. Sir George looked at his watch and got to his feet. Two minutes later he said a curt goodbye at the street door, neither mentioning nor glancing at the offending name-plate. As she climbed the stairs, Cordelia wondered whether she could have managed the interview better. It was a pity that it had ended so abruptly. There were questions which she wished she had thought to ask, in particular whether any of the people she was to meet on Courcy Island knew of the threatening messages. She would have to wait now until she met Miss Lisle.

As she opened the office door, Miss Maudsley and Bevis looked up over their typewriters with avid eyes. It would have been heartless to deny them a share in the news. They had sensed that Sir George was no ordinary client and curiosity and excitement had virtually paralysed them. There had been a suspicious absence of clacking typewriters from the outer office during his visit. Now Cordelia told them as little as was compatible with telling them anything worth hearing, emphasizing that Miss Lisle was looking for a companion-secretary who would protect her from an irritating but unimportant poison-pen nuisance. She said nothing about the nature of the threatening messages nor of the actress's conviction that her life was seriously threatened. She warned them that this assignment, like all jobs, even the most trivial, was to be treated as confidential. Miss Maudsley said:

'Of course, Miss Gray. Bevis understands that perfectly well.'

Bevis was passionate in his assurances.

'I'm more reliable than I look. I won't utter, honestly. I never do, not about the Agency. But I'll be no good if anyone tortures me for information. I can't stand pain.'

Cordelia said:

'No one's going to torture you, Bevis.'

By general consent they took an early lunch-hour. Bevis fetched sandwiches from the Carnaby Street delicatessen and Miss Maudsley made coffee. Sitting cosily in the outer office they gave themselves over to happy speculation about where this interesting new assignment might lead. And the hour wasn't wasted. Unexpectedly, both Miss Maudsley and Bevis had helpful information to give about Courcy Island and its owner, pouring out a spate of antiphonal chat. It wasn't the first time this had happened. Their more orthodox skills might be suspect, but they not infrequently provided a bonus in the way of useful gossip.

'You'll enjoy the castle, Miss Gray, if you're interested in Victorian architecture. My brother took the Mothers' Union to the island for their summer outing the month before he died. Of course, I'm not a full member, I couldn't be. But I usually went on the outings, and this one was so interesting. I particularly enjoyed the pictures and the porcelain. And there's one delightful bedroom which is almost a museum to the Victorian arts and crafts movement; De Morgan tiles, Ruskin drawings, Mackmurdo furniture… It was quite an expensive outing, I remember. Mr Gorringe, he's the owner, only allows parties once a week during the season and he restricts the numbers to twelve at a time, so I suppose he has to charge rather a lot to make it worth while. But no one grumbled, not even Mrs Baggot who was always, I'm afraid, rather inclined to complain at the end of the day. And the island itself, so beautiful and varied, and such peace. Low cliffs, woods, fields and marshes. It's like England in miniature.'

'Darlings, I was actually in the theatre when she dried, Clarissa Lisle, I mean. It was ghastly. It wasn't just that she forgot the lines, though I don't see how anyone can forget Lady Macbeth, the part practically speaks itself. She dried completely. We could hear the prompter positively shrieking at her from where Peter -he was my friend – and I were sitting. And then she gave a kind of gasp and ran offstage.' Bevis's outraged voice recalled Miss Maudsley from her happy recollection of Orpen portraits and William Morris tapestries.

'Poor woman! How terrible for her, Bevis.'

'Terrible for the rest of the cast. For us, too. Altogether shame-making. After all, she is a professional actress with something of a reputation. You don't expect her to behave like a hysterical schoolgirl who's lost her nerve at her first amateur performance. I was amazed when Metzler offered her Vittoria after that Macbeth. She started all right and the notices weren't that bad, but they say that things got pretty dodgy before it folded.'

Bevis spoke as one who had been privy to all the negotiations. Cordelia had often wondered at the assurance which he assumed whenever they spoke of the theatre, that exotic world of fantasy and desire, his promised land, his native air. He said:

'I'd love to see the Victorian theatre on Courcy Island. It's very small – only a hundred seats – but they say it's perfect. The original owner built it for Lillie Langtry when she was mistress to the Prince of Wales. He used to visit the island and the house party would amuse themselves with amateur theatricals.'

'How do you get to know these things, Bevis?'

'There was an article about the castle in one of the Sundays soon after Mr Gorringe had completed the restoration. My friend showed it to me. He knows I'm interested. The auditorium looked charming. It even has a royal box decorated with the Prince of Wales feathers. I wish I could see it. I'm madly envious.'

Cordelia said:

'Sir George told me about the theatre. The present owner must be rich. It can't have been cheap, restoring the theatre and the castle and collecting the Victoriana.'

Surprisingly, it was Miss Maudsley who replied: 'Oh, but he is! He made a fortune out of that bestseller he wrote. Autopsy. He's A. K. Ambrose. Didn't you know?' Cordelia hadn't known. She had bought the paperback, as had thousands of others, because she had got tired of seeing its dramatic cover confronting her in every bookshop and supermarket and had felt curious to know what it was about a first novel that could earn a reputed half a million before publication. It was fashionably long and equally fashionably violent and she remembered that she had indeed, as the blurb promised, found it difficult to put down, without now being able to remember clearly either the plot or the characters. The idea had been neat enough. The novel dealt with an autopsy on a murder victim and had told at length the stories of all the people involved, forensic pathologist, police officer, mortuary attendant, family of the victim, victim and, finally, the murderer. You could, she supposed, call it a crime novel with a difference, the difference being that there had been more sex, normal and abnormal, than detection and that the book had attempted with some success to combine the popular family saga with the mystery. The writing style had been nicely judged for the mass market, neither good enough to jeopardize popular appeal nor bad enough to make people ashamed of being seen reading it in public. At the end she had been left dissatisfied, but whether that was because she had felt manipulated or because of a conviction that the pseudonymous A.K. Ambrose could have written a better book had he chosen, it was hard to say. But the sexual interludes, cunningly spaced, all written with undertones of irony and self-disgust, and the detailed description of the dissection of a female body certainly had a salacious power. Here at least the writer had been himself.

Miss Maudsley was anxious to disclaim any implied criticism in her question.

'It's not surprising that you didn't know. I wouldn't have known myself, only one of the members on the summer outing had a husband who keeps a bookshop and she told us. Mr Ambrose doesn't really like it to be known. It's the only book he's written I believe.'

Cordelia began to feel a lively curiosity to see the egregiously talented Ambrose Gorringe and his off-shore island. She sat musing on the oddities of this new assignment while Bevis collected the coffee cups, it being his turn to wash up. Miss Maudsley had fallen into a pensive silence, hands folded in her lap. Suddenly she looked up and said:

'I do hope you won't be in any danger, Miss Gray. There's something wicked, one might say evil, about poison-pen letters. We had a spate of them once in the parish and it ended very tragically. They're so frighteningly malevolent.'

Cordelia said:

'Malevolent, but not dangerous. I'm more likely to be bored by the case than frightened. And I can't imagine anything very terrible happening on Courcy Island.'

Bevis, precariously balancing the three mugs, turned around at the door.

'But terrible things have happened there! I don't know what exactly. The article I read didn't say. But the present castle is built on the site of an old medieval castle which used to guard that part of the Channel, so it's probably inherited a ghost or two. And the writer did mention the island's violent and bloodstained history.'

Cordelia said:

'That's just a journalistic platitude. All the past is bloodstained. That doesn't mean that its ghosts still walk.'

She spoke entirely without premonition, glad of the chance of a real job at last, happy at the thought of getting out of London while the warm autumnal weather still lasted, seeing already in her mind the soaring turrets, the gull-loud marshes, the gentle uplands and woods of this miniature England, so mysterious and beautiful, lying waiting for her in the sun.

CHAPTER THREE

Ambrose Gorringe now visited London so rarely that he was beginning to wonder whether the subscription to his town club was really justified. There were parts of the capital in which he still felt at home, but too many others in which he had previously walked with pleasure now seemed to him grubby, despoiled and alien. When business with his stockbroker, agent or publisher made a visit desirable, he would plan a programme of what he described to himself as treats, an adult re-enactment of school holidays, leaving no portion of a day so unprovided for that he had time to ponder on his stupidity in being where he was. A visit to Saul Gaskin's small antique shop near Notting Hill Gate was invariably in his programme. He bought most of his Victorian pictures and furniture at the London auction houses, but Gaskin knew and partially shared his passion for Victoriana and he could be confident that there would be, awaiting his inspection, a small collection of the trivia which was often so much more redolent of the spirit of the age than his more important acquisitions.

In the unseasonable September heat the cluttered and ill-ventilated office at the back of the shop smelt like a lair in which Gaskin, with his white, pinched face, precise little hands and grubby moleskin waistcoat scurried around like a tenacious rodent. Now he unlocked his desk drawer and reverently laid before this favoured customer the scavengings of the last four months. The Bristol blue decanter engraved with a design of grapes and vineleaves was attractive, but there were only five glasses and he liked his sets complete, while one of a pair of Wedgwood vases designed by Walter Crane was slightly chipped. He was surprised that Gaskin, knowing that he demanded perfection, had bothered to keep them for him. But the ornately trimmed menu for the banquet given by the Queen at Windsor Castle on 10th October 1844 to celebrate the appointment of King Louis Philippe of France as a Knight of the Garter was a happy find. He played with the idea that it would be amusing to serve the same meal at Courcy Casde on the anniversary, but reminded himself that there were limits both to Mrs Munter's culinary skills and to the capacity of his guests.

But Gaskin had saved the best until last. He now brought out, with his customary grave air of serving some secular Mass to a devotee, two heavy mourning brooches, beautifully wrought in black enamel and gold, each with a lock of hair intricately twisted into whorls and petals; a widow's black peaked bonnet, still in the hatbox in which it was delivered, and a marble carving of a baby's plump truncated arm reposing on a purple velvet cushion. Gorringe took the cap in his hands stroking the goffered satin, the streamers of ostentatious woe. He wondered what had happened to its owner. Had she followed her husband to an untimely grave, desolated by grief? Or had the bonnet, an expensive contraption, merely failed to please? Both it and the brooches would be an addition to the bedroom in Courcy Casde which he called Memento Mori and where he kept his collection of Victorian necrophilia; the death masks of Carlyle, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, the black-edged memorial cards with their weeping angels and sentimental verses, the commemorative cups, medals and mugs, the wardrobe of heavy mourning garments, black, grey and mauve. It was a room Clarissa had only once entered with a shudder and now pretended didn't exist. But he had noted with pleasure that those of his guests who were lovers, acknowledged or furtive, liked occasionally to sleep there rather, he thought, as eighteenth-century whores had copulated with their clients on the flat tops of tombs in London's East End graveyards. He watched with a sardonic and slightly contemptuous eye this symbiosis of eroticism and morbidity, as he did all those human foibles which he happened not to share.

He said:

'I'll take these. And probably the marble too. Where did you find it'

'A private sale. I don't think it's a memorial piece. The owner claimed that it was a duplicate of one of the marble limbs of the royal children at Osborne carved for Queen Victoria. This one is probably the arm of the infant Princess Royal.'

'Poor Vicky! What with her formidable mother, her son and Bismarck, not the happiest of princesses. It's almost irresistible, but not at that price.'

'The cushion is the original. And if it is the arm of the Princess, it's probably unique. There's no record as far as I know of any duplicates of the Osborne pieces.'

They entered into their usual amicable pattern of bargaining, but Gorringe sensed that Gaskin's heart wasn't in it. He was a superstitious man and it was apparent to Gorringe that the marble, which he seemed unable to bring himself to touch, both fascinated and repelled him. He wanted jt out of his shop.

Hardly had the business concluded than there was a ring on the locked street door. As Gaskin left to answer it, Gorringe asked if he might use the telephone. It had occurred to him that with some slight hurry he could catch an earlier train. As usual, it was Munter who answered the ring.

'Courcy Castle.'

'Gorringe, Munter. I'm ringing from London. I find that I shall, after all, be able to catch the two thirty train. I should be at the quay by four forty.'

'Very good, sir. I will instruct Oldfield.'

'Is all well, Munter?'

'Quite well, sir. Tuesday's dress rehearsal was hardly a success but I understand that this is considered propitious for the actual performance.'

'The lighting rehearsal was satisfactory?'

'Yes, sir. If I may say so, the company is more fortunate in the talent of its amateur electricians than in its actors.'

'And Mrs Munter? Have you been able to get all the help she needs for Saturday?'

'Not quite all. Two of the girls from the town have defaulted but Mrs Chambers is bringing her granddaughter. I have interviewed the girl and she seems well intentioned if untrained. If the Courcy play is to be an annual event, sir, we may have to reconsider our staffing needs, at least for this one week of the year.'

Gorringe said calmly:

'I don't think that either you or Mrs Munter need assume that the play will be an annual event. If you feel the need to plan for twelve months ahead, it would be safer to assume that this is the last performance which Lady Ralston will give on Courcy.'

'Thank you, sir. I should tell you that Lady Ralston telephoned. Sir George has an unexpected meeting to attend and is unlikely to arrive before Saturday afternoon and, possibly, not until after the performance. Lady Ralston proposes to solace marital deprivation by inviting a secretary-companion, a Miss Cordelia Gray. She will arrive with the rest of the party on Friday morning. Lady Ralston appeared to think that she need not speak to you personally about this arrangement.'

Munter's disapproval came over the line as clearly as his carefully controlled irony. He was adept at judging just how far he could safely go, and since his veiled insolence was never directed against his employer, Gorringe was indulgent. A man, particularly a servant, was entitled to his small recalcitrant bolsterings of self-respect. Gorringe had noted early in their relationship how Munter's persona, modelled as it was on Jeeves and his near namesake Bunter, became markedly closer to parody when any of his carefully contrived domestic arrangements was upset. During Clarissa's visits to the castle he became almost intolerably Bunterish. Relishing his manservant's eccentricities, the contrast between his bizarre appearance and his manner, totally uncurious about his past, Gorringe now hardly bothered to wonder whether a real Munter existed and, if so, what manner of man he might be.

He heard him say:

'I thought that Miss Gray could be companionable in the De Morgan room, subject to your agreement.'

'That would seem suitable. And if Sir George does arrive for Saturday night he can have Memento Mori. A soldier should be inured to death. Do we know anything about Miss Gray?'

'A young lady, I understand. I take it that she will eat in the dining-room.'

'Of course.'

Whatever Clarissa thought she was up to, it would at least even the numbers at his dinner-table. But the thought of Clarissa with a secretary-companion, and a woman at that, was intriguing. He hoped that her addition to the party wouldn't make the weekend more complicated than it already promised to be.

'Goodbye, Munter.'

'Goodbye, sir.'

When Gaskin returned to the office he found his customer sitting contemplatively holding the marble arm. He gave an involuntary shiver. Gorringe replaced the marble on its cushion and watched while Gaskin busied himself finding a small cardboard box and lining it with tissue paper.

He said:

'You don't like it?'

Gaskin could afford to be frank. The limb was sold and Mr Gorringe had never yet rejected a piece once the price was agreed. He lowered the arm into its box taking care to touch only the cushion.

'I can't say I'm sorry to see it go. I usually do very well with – those porcelain models of the human hand which the Victorians were so fond of, ring stands and so on. I had a nice one in last week but the wrist frill was chipped. It wouldn't have interested you. But a child's arm! And cut off like that! I call it brutal, almost morbid. It's just a feeling I have about the piece. You know how I am. It reminds me of death.'

Gorringe took a final look at the brooches before they were wrapped and boxed.

'Less rationally, surely, than should the jewellery and the widow's cap. I agree with you; I doubt whether this is a memorial marble.'

Gaskin said firmly:

'They're different. They don't worry me, memorials never have: But this is different. To tell you the truth, I took against it as soon as it came into the shop. Whenever I look at it, I keep imagining that it's oozing blood.'

Gorringe smiled.

'I must try it on my house guests and watch their reactions. The Courcy play next weekend is The Duchess.of Malfi. If this were a full-sized male hand we could use it for one of the props. But even the Duchess, in her extremity could hardly mistake this for the dead hand of Antonio.'

The allusion was lost on Gaskin who had never read Webster. He murmured:

'No indeed, sir,' and smiled his sly, sycophantic smile.

Five minutes later, he saw his customer and his parcels formally off the premises, congratulating himself with premature satisfaction – for despite his carefully nurtured sensitivity he had never claimed to be a clairvoyant – that he had seen and heard the last of the arm of the dead Princess.

CHAPTER FOUR

Less than two miles away, in a Harley Street consulting-room, Ivo Whittingham slipped his legs over the edge of the examination couch and watched Dr Crantley-Mathers shuffle back to his desk. The doctor, as always, was wearing his old but well-tailored pinstripe suit. Nothing so clinical as a white coat ever intruded into his consulting room, and the room itself with its patterned Axminster carpet, its Edwardian carved desk holding the silver-framed photographs of Sir James's grandchildren and distinguished patients, its sporting prints and the portrait of some solidly prosperous ancestor holding pride of place above the carved marble mantelshelf, looked more like a private study than a consulting room. No apparent effort was made to keep infection at bay; but then, thought Whittingham, germs would know better than to lurk in the well-upholstered armchair in which Sir James's patients awaited his advice. Even the examination couch looked unclinical, being covered with brown leather and mounted by way of elegant eighteenth-century library steps. The assumption was that, although a number of Sir James's guests might wish for some private whim to take off their clothes, that eccentricity could have nothing to do with the state of their health.

Now he looked up from his prescription pad and asked:

'That spleen troubling you?'

'As it must weigh twenty pounds and I look and feel like a lopsided pregnant woman, yes, you could say that it's troubling me.'

'The time may come when it's better out. No hurry, though. We'll have another think in a month's time.'

Whittingham went behind the painted oriental screen where his clothes were folded over a chair and began to dress, drawing his trousers up over the heavy belly. It was, he thought, like carrying one's own death, feeling it drag at the muscles, a foetus-like incubus which never stirred, reminding him with its dead weight, by the deformity which he saw in his mirror every time he bathed, what it was he bore within him. Looking over the screen, he said, his voice muffled by his shirt:

'I thought you explained that the spleen is enlarged because it's taken over the manufacture of the red blood corpuscles which my blood's no longer producing.'

Sir James didn't look up. He said with careful unconcern, 'That's more or less what's happening, yes. When one organ ceases to function, another tends to take over.'

'So would it be tactless to inquire which organ will obligingly take over the job when you've whipped out the spleen?'

Sir James guffawed at this witticism. 'Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?' He had never, thought Whittingham, been a man for originality of speech.

For the first time since his illness began Whittingham would have liked to ask his doctor directly how much time remained for him. It wasn't that there were affairs that he needed to put in order. Divorced from his wife, alienated from his children, and living now alone, his affairs, like his obsessively tidy flat, had been depressingly in order for the last five years. The need to know was now little more than a mild curiosity. He would be glad to learn that he was to be spared another Christmas, his most disliked time of the year. But he realized that the question would be in the worst of taste. The room itself had been designed to make it unsayable; Sir James was adept at training his patients not to ask questions which they knew it would distress him to have to answer. His philosophy – and Whittingham wasn't altogether in disagreement with it – was that patients would realize in their own good time that they were dying and that, by then, physical weakness would ensure that the realization would be less painful than a sentence of death pronounced when the blood still ran strongly. He had never believed that the loss of hope did anyone any good, and besides, doctors could be wrong. This last assertion was a conventional gesture to modesty. Sir James did not privately believe that he personally could be wrong, and indeed he was a superb diagnostician. It was hardly his fault, thought Whittingham, that the ability of the medical profession to diagnose is so far in advance of its ability to cure. Slipping his arms through his jacket sleeves he spoke aloud Brachiano's words from The White Devil:

'On pain of death, let no man name death to me:

It is a word infinitely terrible.' It was a view Sir James obviously shared. It was surprising, supposing him to know them, that he hadn't carved the words over his door lintel.

'I'm sorry, Mr Whittingham. I didn't quite catch what you said.'

'Nothing, Sir James. I was merely quoting Webster.'

Escorting his patient to the consulting-room door at which an exceedingly pretty nurse was waiting to see him finally on his way, the doctor asked:

'Are you going out of London this weekend? It's a pity to waste this weather.'

'To Dorset, actually. To Courcy Island, off Speymouth. An amateur company with some professional support is putting on The Duchess of Malfi and I'm doing a piece for one of the colour supplements.' He added, 'It's chiefly about the restoration of the Victorian theatre on the island and its history.' Immediately he despised himself for the explanation. What was it but a way of saying that dying he might be but he wasn't yet reduced to reviewing amateurs?

'Good. Good.' Sir James boomed out a note of approval which might have sounded excessive even for God on the seventh day.

When the imposing front door had closed behind him Whittingham was tempted to hire the taxi which had just drawn up, presumably to deposit another patient. But he decided he might manage a mile of the walk to his Russell Square flat. And there was a new coffee house in Marylebone High Street where the young couple who owned it ground the beans freshly and made their own cakes, and where a few chairs under umbrellas gave the locals the illusion that the English summer was suitable for eating out. He might rest there for ten minutes. It was extraordinary how important these trivial self-indulgences had become. As he resigned himself to the accidie of mortal illness he was beginning to acquire some of the foibles of old age, a liking for small treats, a fussiness about routine, a reluctance to bother with even his oldest acquaintances, an indolence which made even dressing and bathing a burden, a preoccupation with his bodily functions. He despised the half-man he had become, but even this self-disgust had some of the querulous resentment of senility. But Sir James was right. It was difficult to feel regret about losing a life so diminished. By the time this sickness had finished with him, death would be no more than the final disintegration of a body from which the spirit had already seeped away, worn out by pain, by weariness and by a malaise which went deeper than physical weakness, some brittle-armed traitor of the heart who had never mustered the will to fight.

As he made his way down Wimpole Street through the mellow autumn sunlight he thought of the great performances he had seen and reviewed and mentally spoke the names like a roll call: Olivier's Richard the Third, Wolfit playing Malvolio, Gielgud's Hamlet, Richardson's Falstaff, Peggy Ashcroft's Portia. He could recall them, could remember the theatres, the directors, even some of the most quoted extracts from his reviews. It was interesting that, after thirty years of play-going, it was the classics which had lasted longest for him. But he knew that, even if he were this night to take his accustomed seat in the third row of the stalls, formally dressed as he always was for a first night, listening to that anticipatory hum which is unlike any other sound in the world, nothing that happened when the curtain rose would move or excite him beyond a mild, detached interest. The glory and the wonder had departed. Never again would he feel that tingle between the shoulder blades, that almost physical surge of the blood which, for all his youth, had been his response to great acting. It was ironic that now, all passion spent, he was about to review his last play, and that an amateur production. But somehow he would find the energy for what he had to do on Courcy Island.

The island was reputed to be beautiful and the castle an interesting example of high Victorian panache. Seeing them would probably be worth the effort of the journey, which was as close as he could now get to enthusiasm. But he was less sure about the company. Clarissa had mentioned that her cousin, Roma Lisle, was to be there with a friend. He hadn’t met Roma, but had had to listen to Clarissa's caustic disparagement of her for too many years to relish being under the same roof as them both, while the careful omission of the friend's name hadn't been reassuring. And the boy was to be with them, apparently. Clarissa's decision to take on the son of her drowned husband, Martin Lessing, had been one of her more spectacular impulses; he wondered who was regretting it more, benefactress or victim. On the three occasions on which he had met Simon Lessing, two at the theatre and one at a party at Clarissa's Bayswater flat, he had been struck by the boy's gaucherie and by a sense of deep personal wretchedness which he thought had less to do with adolescence than with Clarissa. There had been something dog-like in his servility, a desperate need to win her approval without the least idea what it was she wanted of him. Whittingham had seen that same look in his father's eyes; the prick of memory hadn't been comfortable. Simon was supposed to be a talented pianist. Probably Clarissa had seen herself splendidly cantilevered in one of the front boxes at the Royal Festival Hall while her prodigy, adoring eyes glancing upwards, took his triumphant bow. It must be disconcerting for her to be faced instead with the moodiness and the physical gracelessness of adolescence. He found himself possessed of a slight interest in seeing how the two of them were making out. And there would be other minor satisfactions; not the least would be watching how Clarissa Lisle was coping with her own neurosis. If this were to be his last performance there was some satisfaction in knowing that it might well be hers. She would know that he was dying. She had the use of her eyes. But he wouldn't grudge her any pleasure she could get from observing the process of his physical disintegration. There were subtler pleasures than that; watching mental disintegration might, he suspected, be among them. He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.

Walking slowly in the sunshine and thinking of the weekend ahead, he smiled at the realization that what was most alive in him now was the capacity for mischief.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the basement of a small shop in a passageway off the north end of Tottenham Court Road, Roma Lisle was on her knees unpacking and sorting a box of second-hand books. The room, which had originally been a kitchen and which still contained an old porcelain sink, a row of wall-mounted cupboards and a disconnected gas cooker so heavy that the combined efforts of Colin and herself had been unable to shift it, was oppressively hot despite the tiled floor. Outside, the accumulated heat of the dying summer seemed to have concentrated in the area beneath the iron railings, pressing against the one small window like a sweaty, fume-soaked blanket, cutting off air as well as light. Above her the single pendant light threw shadows rather than illumination; it was ridiculous to have to be using expensive electricity on such a day. She must have been mad ever to have thought that this hole could be transformed into an intimate, invitingly cosy second-hand books department, a browser's delight.'

The books, she now saw, were a poor lot. She had bid for them and bought them cheaply at a country-house sale. Now the first real inspection revealed that it hadn't been cheap enough. The best had been on the top. The rest were a motley collection of Victorian sermons, reminiscences of retired generals, biographies of minor politicians as undistinguished in death as they had been in life, novels which provoked no interest except a wonder that anyone should have chosen to publish them.

Her knees were numb against the tiles, her nostrils choked with the smell of dust, of mouldering cardboard and rotting paper. In her imagination it was to have been so different; Colin kneeling beside her, the happy rummaging, the exclamations of pleasure as each treasure came to light, the laughter, the planning, the fun. She remembered their last day at Pottergate Comprehensive, the farewell party with its cheap sherry, and inevitable crisps and cheese savouries; the barely concealed envy of their colleagues that she and Colin were getting out, setting up business together, saying goodbye to timetables, mark sheets, examinations, the daily dispiriting struggle to impose order on a class of forty in an inner city comprehensive where teaching had always to be subordinated to the struggle to maintain some semblance of discipline.

And that was only nine months ago! Nine months in which everything they had bought, everything they needed had become more expensive, in which the shop had been as dead as if boarded up and bankrupt. Nine months of overwork and dwindling returns, of fading hope and half-acknowledged panic. Nine months – could it be? – of the slow death of desire. She almost cried out in protest, shoving her strong hands against the box as if the thought and its pain could be physically pushed from her mind. And then she heard his step on the stairs. She turned her face to his, making herself smile. He had hardly spoken over luncheon. But that was three hours ago. Sometimes his moods didn't last. His first words destroyed hope.

'My God, this place stinks.'

'It won't, once we get it cleaned up.'

'And how long will that take? It needs an army of cleaners and decorators. And even then, it'll still look what it is, a basement slum.'

He slumped down on an unopened box of books and began turning over the pile she had unpacked, letting them drop with careful disdain in an untidy heap. In the dim light his handsome, petulant face looked lined with weariness. Why? she wondered. It was she who had been doing the work. She held out her hand and after a moment he took it in a limp grasp.

She thought:

'Oh God, I love you! We love each other. Don't take that away from me.'

He slid his hand from hers almost furtively and began to pretend an interest in one of the books. As he opened it, a small sheet of thick and faded paper fluttered out.

She said:

'What's that?'

'Some kind of old woodcut by the look of it. I shouldn't think it has any value.'

'We could ask Ambrose Gorringe when we get to Courcy Island. He knows about these things even if they aren’t his period.''

They peered at it together. It was certainly old, early seventeenth-century she guessed from the antiquated spelling, and it was in remarkably good condition. The paper was headed with a crude woodcut of a skeleton holding in its right hand an arrow and in its left an hourglass. Beneath was the title, 'The Gt Meffenger of Mortality', followed by the verse. She read the first four lines aloud:

Fair lady lay your costly robe afide, No longer may you glory in your pride, Take leave of all your carnal vain delight, I'm come to fummon you away tonight.

The undated subscription gave the printer's name as John Evans of Long Lane, London. Roma said:

'It reminds me of Clarissa.'

'Of Clarissa? Why?'

'I don't know. I don't know why.'

He pressed her, sounding irritably insistent, as if it mattered, as if she had intended something.

'It's just something I said, something that came into my mind. It didn't mean anything. Put the paper by the sink, on the draining-board. We'll show it to Ambrose Gorringe.' He did so and returned moodily to his box. He said:

'It was a mistake, buying this junk. We should have stuck to the new stock. London seems to have a surfeit of bookshops. And God knows why I let you talk me into buying all that left-wing stuff upstairs. No one wants it. The left wing already have enough cosy haunts in this neighbourhood and it only repels the other buyers. Those pamphlets are just gathering dust. I must have been mad.' She knew that he wasn't referring only to the left-wing literature. The injustice stung her into anger. She knew even as she spoke that it was folly. He needed to be cajoled, humoured, comforted. The quarrels which he seemed increasingly to provoke only left him sulky and resentful and herself exhausted. But she had had enough.

'Look, you didn't take on this place to oblige me. You were just as keen to get out of Pottergate. You loathed teaching. Remember? I was fed up with it, I admit, but I wouldn't have resigned if you hadn't made the first move.'

'You mean, it's all my fault.'

'All! What all? It isn't anyone's fault. We both did what we wanted.'

'Then what are you complaining about?'

'It's just that I'm tired of being made to feel as if I'm some kind of encumbrance, worse than a wife, as if you're only keeping on the shop because of me.'

'I'm keeping it – we're keeping it on – because there's no alternative. Pottergate wouldn't take us back even if we applied.'

And where else could they apply? He didn't need her to tell him about the unemployment in the teaching profession, the expenditure cuts, the desperate search for jobs even by the best qualified. She said, knowing even as she spoke that argument was folly, that it would only fuel his irritation:

'If you do chuck it, it'll please Stella. I suppose that's what she's been waiting for. She can say "I told you so" and hand you over, neatly trussed, a sacrificial victim to dear Daddy and the family business. My God, she must be praying for our bankruptcy! It's a wonder she doesn't lurk outside counting the customers.'

His protest was sulky rather than vehement. It was, after all, an argument they had had before. 'She knows I'm worried, obviously. She's worried herself. She has a right to be. Half of the money I put in here was hers.'

As if that needed saying. As if she didn't know exactly how much cash from Daddy's generous allowance Stella had graciously handed over. And that was generous of her, generous or stupid or cunning. Or all three. Because she must have known that Colin was going into partnership with his mistress, she wasn't that blind. Oh, she'd known all right! She couldn't understand what he saw in Roma – she wasn't unique in that – but she'd known the score. And had this been her revenge, the money to set up a partnership which was bound to fail, given their inexperience, their small capital, their self-delusions; a failure that would draw him back, suitably chastened, to the place where he belonged, the place, come to think of it, that he'd never really left? And then what would there be for him but Daddy's business, the store in Kilburn which sold cheap plywood furniture on hire purchase to customers too ignorant to know when they were being cheated or too proud in their poverty to rummage round the street markets and buy good solid oak, second-hand. The stuff he dazzled them with, cocktail cabinets, room dividers, ornate suites would fall or be kicked to pieces long before they'd finished paying for it. Was that what Colin wanted to do with his life? Had he left teaching for that? And had Stella thought all this out for herself or had Daddy a hand in it? The money she had lent them, hadn't it been carefully calculated, enough to make the enterprise possible but not enough to enable them to succeed? She was sharp enough. She had a shrewd little mind to go with those sharp painted nails, those white, childlike teeth. And she had other weapons, Justin and Joanna. Possessiveness and acquisitiveness had been sanctified by maternity. She had the twins. And, by God, she knew how to use them! With every childhood infection, every school speechday, every dental appointment, every family holiday, every Christmas demanding his presence at home, it was as if she were saying: 'He may sleep with you, play at keeping shop with you, imagine that he's in love with you, confide in you. But he'll never give you children. And he'll never divorce me to marry you.' Appalled at her thoughts, at what was happening to them, she cried:

'Look, darling, don't let's quarrel. We're tired, we're hot and it's a bloody day. On Friday we shut the door on the whole scene and take off for Courcy Island. Three days of peace, sunshine, good wines, first-class food and the sea. The island's only three miles by two-and-a-half, so Clarissa says, but there are marvellous walks. We can get away from the rest of the party. Clarissa will be busy with the play. I don't suppose Ambrose Gorringe will care a damn what we do. No creditors, no people, just peace. And, my God, don't I need it.'

She was going to add, 'And I need you, my darling. More and more. Always.' But then she looked up and saw his face.

It wasn't an unfamiliar look, that mixture of shame, irritation, embarrassment. She had seen it before. This, after all, had been the pattern of their lives, the plans so confidently, so happily made, the last-minute cancellations. But never before had it mattered so desperately. Tears scalded her eyes. She told herself that she had to stay calm, that she mustn't break down, but when she could speak the note of angry recrimination was unmistakable even to her own ears and she saw the look of shame harden into defiance.

'You can't do this to me! You can't! You promised! And I've told Clarissa I'm bringing my partner. It's all arranged.'

'I know and I'm sorry. But Stella's father telephoned at breakfast to say that he's coming for the weekend. I've got to be there. I've told you what he's like. He was pretty fed up about my leaving teaching. We've never got on. He thinks I don't appreciate her enough; you know how it is with an only child. He's not going to be pleased if he finds I'm away for a long weekend leaving her to cope with the kids. And he won't believe the story about attending a book sale. I don't think even Stella does.'

So that was it. Daddy was arriving, Daddy who paid the twins' school fees, provided the car, the annual holiday, the luxuries which had become necessities. Daddy who had his own ideas about his son-in-law's future.

She said in a voice that was almost a wail:

'What is Clarissa going to think?'

'Well, isn't it rather what she'd think if I did come? She knows I'm married. I mean, you must have let that drop. Wouldn't it look rather odd, the two of us arriving together? And it's not as if we could have shared a room or anything like that.'

'By anything like that I suppose you mean that we couldn't have slept together. Why not? Clarissa isn't exactly a model of purity and I don't suppose Ambrose Gorringe creeps down his corridors at night checking that his guests are in their own rooms.'

He muttered:

'It's not that. I explained. It's Stella's father.'

'But this weekend might have freed you from him and her. I thought we could have spoken to Clarissa, told her about the shop, asked if she couldn't help. That's why I wangled the invitation. After all, a third of her money comes to me if she dies without a child. It's all in Uncle's will. It wouldn't harm her to part with some when it's most needed. We'd only be asking for a loan.'

She tried not to see the hope brightening in his face. Then it faded. He said sulkily:

'I couldn't ask a woman for money.'

'You wouldn't have to. I'd do the asking. What I thought was that she'd meet you, like you. She'd be seeing you under the best possible conditions. Then I could speak to her when the time seemed right. It's worth a try, darling. Even twenty thousand would mean all the difference.'

'What would you get if she died?'

'I'm not sure. About eighty thousand I think. It could be more.'

He turned away. 'And that's about what we'd need if I were to leave Stella, get a divorce. But Clarissa isn't going to die just to convenience us. Twenty thousand might just save the shop. But that's about all it would do. And why should she part with it? Anyone with an ounce of financial sense would see that it would be throwing good money after bad. It's no use. I can't come this weekend.'

Above them the floor creaked. Someone had come into the shop. He said quickly, gratefully:

'Sounds like a customer. Look, I'll close promptly at five if there's nothing doing and give you a hand down here. We'll get this room together somehow.'

When he had gone she went over and stared out of the window, standing rigidly, grasping the edges of the sink so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her eyes were unfocused, staring beyond the railings, the crumbling stucco on the basement wall, to where the brightly patterned reds, greens and yellows of the fruit stall on the opposite pavement fused and shivered. From time to time feet passed, voices called, the narrow street broke momentarily into life. And still that silent figure at the window stood unmoving. Then she gave a little sigh. The taut shoulders relaxed, the fingers loosened their grip. She took up the woodcut from the draining-board and studied it as if she hadn't seen it before. Then she opened her shoulder-bag and folded it carefully away.

CHAPTER SIX

Simon Lessing stood at the open window of his study at Melhurst and gazed out over the wide lawns to where the river cut its slow stream between the horse chestnuts and the limes. In his hand he held Clarissa's still unopened letter. It had arrived by the morning post, but there had been an excuse for not opening it then. He had had an early practice period. And that had been followed by the sixth-form seminar. He had told himself that he would wait until break. But the morning had passed and now it was the lunch-hour. In less than five minutes the bell would sound. He couldn't delay indefinitely. It was ridiculous and humiliating to be so afraid, to stand like a first-former holding a dreaded school report, knowing that, however long and cunningly deferred, the moment of truth must come at last.

He would wait until the bell actually sounded, and then he would read it, quickly, uncaring and with his mind on luncheon. And at least he could do so in peace. From the middle school upwards, every boy at Melhurst had his own study. The importance of a daily period of silence and privacy was one of the more enlightened precepts of the school's pious seventeenth-century founder and, largely because it had been incorporated into the almost monastic architecture, had endured through three hundred years of changing educational fashion. It was one of the things about Melhurst which Simon most valued, one of the privileges which Clarissa's patronage, Clarissa's money, had procured for him. Neither she nor Sir George had ever considered another choice of school, and Melhurst had made no difficulty about finding a place for the stepson of one of its more distinguished alumni. Its motto, in Greek rather than the more usual Latin, extolled the virtues of moderation, and for three hundred years, in obedience to Theognis' dictum, the school had been moderately famous, moderately expensive and moderately successful. No school could have suited him better. He recognized that its traditions and occasionally bizarre rituals, which he quickly learned and sedulously observed, were designed as much to discourage too personal a commitment as to promote a corporate identity. He was tolerated but left alone, and he asked nothing more. Even his talents were acceptable to the ethos of the school, which, perhaps because of a strong personal antipathy between a nineteenth-century headmaster and Dr Arnold of Rugby, by tradition eschewed muscular Christianity and almost all manifestations of the team spirit and espoused High Anglicanism and the cult of the eccentric. But music was well taught; the school's two orchestras had a national reputation. And swimming, the only physical skill at which he excelled, was one of the more acceptable sports. Compared with the Norman Pagworth Comprehensive, Melhurst seemed to him a haven of civilized order. At Pagworth he had felt like an alien set down without a phrase book in a lawless, ill-governed and alien country whose language and customs, crudely harsh as the playground in which they were born, were terrifyingly incomprehensible. The prospect of having to leave Melhurst and return to his old school had been one of his worst terrors since he began to sense that things were going wrong between himself and Clarissa.

It was strange that fear and gratitude should be so mixed. The gratitude was genuine enough. He only wished that he could experience it as it surely ought to be experienced, a graciousness, a reciprocal benison, free of this dragging load of obligation and guilt. The guilt was the worst to bear. When its weight became almost too much for him he tried to exorcise it by rational thought. It was ridiculous to feel guilty, ridiculous and unnecessary even to feel too oppressive an obligation. Clarissa owed him something after all. It was she who had destroyed his parents' marriage, enticed away his father, helped kill his mother through grief, left him an orphan to endure the discomforts, the vulgarities, the suffocating boredom of his uncle's house. It was Clarissa, not he, who should feel guilt. But even to let this thought creep traitorously into his mind only increased his burden of obligation. He owed her so much. The trouble was that everyone knew just how much. Sir George, who was seldom there, but who, when he was, presented himself to Simon as a silent, accusing personification of all those masculine qualities which he knew were alien to his own personality. He sometimes sensed in Clarissa's husband an inarticulate goodwill which he would have liked to have put to the test if only he could summon the courage. But most of the time he imagined that Sir George had never really approved of Clarissa taking him on and that their secret marital conversations were punctuated with the phrases: 'I told you so. I warned you.' Miss Tolgarth knew; Tolly, whose eyes he dared not meet for fear of. encountering one of those judgemental gazes in which he thought he detected dislike, resentment and contempt. Clarissa knew it, probably to the last penny. Increasingly he had come to feel that Clarissa repented of a generosity which at first had held all the charm of novelty, the magnificent gesture, superbly theatrical at the time in all its eccentricity but which she now saw had lumbered her with a spotty, inarticulate adolescent, ill at ease with her friends; with school bills, holiday arrangements, dental appointments, with all the minor irritations of motherhood and none of its essential compensations. He sensed that there was something she required of him which he could neither identify nor give, some return, unspecified but substantial, which would one day be demanded of him with all the brutal insistence of a tax-collector.

She seldom wrote to him now, and when he did see in his cubby hole that tall, curved hand – she disapproved of personal letters being typed – he had to steel himself to open the envelope. But the apprehension had never before been as bad as this. The letter seemed to have stuck to his hand, to have grown heavy with menace. And then the one o'clock bell clanged out. With sudden vehemence he tore at the corner of the envelope. The pale-blue, linen-based paper which she always used was tough. He wrenched in his thumb and tore a jagged slit through envelope and letter, rough as a lover who cannot wait to know his fate. He saw that the letter was short and his immediate reaction was a moan of relief. If she were throwing him out, if there was to be no last term at Melhurst, no chance of a place at the Royal College of Music, no more allowance, surely the excuse, the justification would require more than half a page. But the first sentence did away with his worst fears.

This is to let you know the arrangements for next weekend. George will drive Tolly and me down to Speymouth before breakfast on Friday but it will be best if you arrive with the rest of the house party in time for lunch. The launch will meet the nine thirty-three from Waterloo. Be at the harbour at Speymouth by eleven-forty. Ivo Whittingham and my cousin Roma will be on the train and you'll also meet a girl, Cordelia Gray. I shall need some extra help during the weekend and she is a kind of temporary secretary, so there will be someone young on the island for you to practise talking to. You should also be able to get some swimming so you won't need to be bored. Bring your dinner-jacket. Mr Gorringe likes to dress in the evenings. And he knows something about music so you may as well select some of your best pieces, the ones you know, nothing too heavy. I've written to your housemaster about the extra day's leave. Did Matron give you that acne lotion I sent last month? I hope you've been using it.

Love, Clarissa

It was odd how soon relief could change to a new and different anxiety, even to resentment. Reading the letter for the second time he wondered why he should have been invited to the island. It was Clarissa's doing, of course. Ambrose Gorringe didn't know him and would hardly be likely to include him among his guests if he did. He remembered vaguely having heard about the island, the restored Victorian theatre, the plans to stage the Webster tragedy, and he sensed that the performance was important to Clarissa, amateur production though it might be. But why should he be there? He was expected to keep out of her way, not to make a nuisance of himself; that much was evident. He could disport himself in the sea or the pool. He supposed that there would be a pool and pictured Clarissa, pale and golden, stretched out in the sun and beside her this new girl, this Cordelia Gray with whom he was supposed to practise making conversation. And what else did Clarissa want him to practise? Making himself agreeable? Paying compliments? Knowing what jokes women like and when to make them? Flirting? Showing himself to be a susceptible heterosexual male? The prospect made his mouth dry with terror. It wasn't that he disliked the idea of a girl. He had already created in his mind the girl he would like to be with on

Courcy Island – on any island; sensitive, beautiful, intelligent, kind and yet wanting him, wanting him to do to her those terrifyingly exciting and shameful things which would no longer be shameful because they loved each other, acts which would reconcile for him in sweet responsive flesh, finally and for ever, that dichotomy which so occupied his day-dreaming hours, between romanticism and desire. He didn't expect to meet this girl, on Courcy or anywhere else. The only girl with whom he had so far had anything to do had been his cousin Susie. He hated Susie, hated her bold contemptuous eyes, her perpetually chewing mouth, her voice which alternately whined or yelled, her dyed hair, her grubby, beringed fingers.

But even if this girl were different, even if he liked her, how could he get to know her when Clarissa would be watching them, marking him for articulacy, attraction, wit, checking up on his social performance as she and this Ambrose Gorringe would be checking up on his musicianship? The reference to his music made his cheeks burn. He was insecure enough about his talent without having it diminished by this coy reference to his 'pieces' as if he were a child showing off to the neighbours at a suburban tea party. But the instruction was clear enough. He was to bring with him something showy or popular or both, something he could play with practised bravado so that she wouldn't be disgraced by any nervous misfingerings and she and Ambrose Gorringe would together decide whether he had enough talent to justify a final year at school, a chance to try for a place at the Royal College or the Academy.

And suppose the verdict went against him? He couldn't return to Mornington Avenue, to his aunt and uncle. Clarissa couldn't do that to him. After all, it was she who had brought the order of release. She had arrived unannounced on a warm afternoon during the summer holidays, when he had been in the house alone as usual, reading at the sitting-room table. He couldn't remember how she had announced herself, whether he had been told that the silent upright man with her was her new husband. But he remembered how she had looked, golden and effulgent, a cool, sweet-smelling miraculous vision who had immediately taken hold of his heart and his life as a rescuer might pluck a drowning child from the water and set him firmly on a sunlit rock. It had been too good to last, of course. But how marvellous in memory shone that long-dead summer afternoon.

'Are you happy here?'

'No.'

'I don't see how you could be, actually. This room's pretty gruesome. I've read somewhere that a million copies of that print have been sold but I didn't realize people actually hung it on their walls. Your father told me that you were musical. Do you still play?'

'I can't. There isn't a piano here. And they only teach percussion at school. They have a West Indian steel band. They're only interested in music where everyone can join in.'

'Things which everyone can join in usually aren't worth doing. They shouldn't have put two different papers on the walls. Three or four might have been bizarre enough to be fun. Two are just vulgar. How old are you? Fourteen, isn't it? How would you like to come and live with us?'

'For always?'

'Nothing is for always. But perhaps. Until you grow up, anyway.'

Without waiting for his reply, without even looking into his face to watch his initial response she turned to the silent man at her side.

'I think we can do better than this for Martin's boy.'

'If you are sure, my dear. Not a thing to decide quickly. Shouldn't make an impulse buy of a child.'

'Darling, where would you be if I hadn't made an impulse buy? And he's the only son I'm ever likely to give you.'

Simon's eyes were turning from one face to the other. He remembered how Sir George had looked, the features stiffening as if the muscles were bracing themselves against pain, against vulgarity. But Simon had seen the hurt, visible, unmistakable, before Sir George had turned silently away.

She had turned to him.

'Will your aunt and uncle mind?'

The misery, the grievances, had spilled out. He had had to prevent himself from clutching at her dress.

'They won't care! They'll be glad! I take up the spare room and I haven't any money. They're always telling me how much it costs to feed me. And they don't like me. They won't mind, honestly.'

And then, on impulse, he had done the right thing. It was the only time he had done exactly the right thing where Clarissa was concerned. There had been a pink geranium in a pot on the window-ledge; his uncle was a keen gardener and grew cuttings in the lean-to greenhouse at the side of the kitchen. One of the flower heads was small and delicate as a rose. He had broken it off and handed it to her; looking up into her face. She had laughed aloud and taken it from him and slipped it into the belt of her dress. Then she had looked at her husband and had laughed again, a peal of happy triumph.

'Well that seems to have decided itself. We'd better stay until they come home. I can't wait to see the owners of this wallpaper. And then we'll take you to buy some clothes.'

And so, with such promise, in such an exhilaration of surprised joy, it had all begun. He tried now to recall when the dream had faded, when things had first started to go wrong. But, apart from the first meeting, had they ever really gone right? He sensed that he was worse than a failure, that he was the last of a series of failures, that earlier disappointments had reinforced her present discontent. He was beginning to dread the holidays although he saw little either of Clarissa or of Sir George. Their official life together, such as it was, was lived in the London flat overlooking Hyde Park. But they were seldom there together. Clarissa had a flat in a Regency square in Brighton, her husband a remote flint cottage on the marshes of the east coast. It was there that their real lives were lived, she in the company of her theatrical friends, he in bird-watching and, if rumour were correct, in right-wing conspiracy. Simon had never been invited to either place although he often pictured them in those other secret worlds, Clarissa in a whirl of gaiety, Sir George conferring with his mysterious, hard-faced and nameless confederates. For some unexplainable reason, these imaginings, which occupied a disproportionate part of his holiday hours, were in the guise of old films. Clarissa and her friends, dressed in the waistless shifts of the twenties, hair shingled and flourishing long cigarette-holders, flung out their legs in a hectic Charleston while Sir George's friends arrived at their rendezvous in veteran cars, trench-coated, their wide-brimmed trilbies pulled down over secretive eyes. Excluded from both these worlds, Simon spent the holidays in the Bayswater flat, looked after occasionally by an almost silent Tolly or coping on his own, eating his dinner each night, by arrangement, in a local restaurant. Recently the meals had become poorer, dishes he chose were no longer available although they were served to others, he was shown to the worst table and kept waiting. Some of the waiters were almost openly offensive. He knew that Clarissa was no longer getting value for money, but he dared not complain. Who was he, so expensively bought and maintained, to talk about value for money?

It was time to go if he wanted any luncheon. He crumpled the letter in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. Shutting his eyes against the brightness of grass and trees and shimmering water, he found himself praying, petitioning the God in whom he no longer believed, with all the desperate urgency, all the artless importunity of a child.

'Please let the weekend be a success. Don't let me make a fool of myself. Please don't let the girl despise me. Please let Clarissa be in a good mood. Please don't let Clarissa throw me out. Oh God, please don't let anything terrible happen on Courcy Island.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was ten o'clock on Thursday night and in her top-floor flat off Thames Street in the City Cordelia was completing her preparations for the weekend ahead. The long, uncurtained windows were fitted with wooden-slatted blinds but these were still up and as she moved from the single large sitting-room to her bedroom she could see spread below her the glittering streets, the dark alleyways, the towers and steeples of the city, could glimpse beyond them the necklace of light slung along the Embankment and the smooth, light-dazzled curve of the river. The view, in daylight or after dark, was a continual marvel to her, the flat itself a source of astonished delight

It had only been after Bernie's death and at the end of her own first traumatic case that she had learned that her father's small estate had at last been wound up. She had expected nothing but debts and it had been a surprise to discover that he had owned a. small house in Paris. It had, she imagined, been purchased years before when he had been comparatively well off to provide a safe house and occasional refuge for the comrades and himself; such a dedicated revolutionary would surely otherwise have despised the acquisition of even so dilapidated and insalubrious a piece of real estate. But the area had been zoned for development and it had sold surprisingly well. There had been enough money, when the debts were paid, for her to finance the Agency for another six months and to begin her search for a London flat cheap enough to buy. No building society had been interested in a sixth-floor apartment at the top of a Victorian warehouse with no lift and the barest amenities, nor in an applicant with an income as uncertain as it was erratic. But her bank manager, apparently to his surprise as much as hers, had been sympathetic and had authorized a five-year loan.

She had paid for the installation of a shower and for the fitting out of the small kitchen, narrow as a galley. She had done the rest of the work herself and had furnished the flat from junk shops and suburban auctions. The immense sitting-room was in white with one wall covered by a bookcase made from painted planks resting on columns of bricks. The dining and working table was scrubbed oak and the heating was provided by an ornate wrought-iron stove. Only the bedroom was luxurious, an intriguing contrast to the spartan bareness of the sitting-room. As it was only eight feet by five Cordelia had felt justified in extravagance and had chosen an expensive and exotic hand-printed paper with which she had covered the ceiling and cupboard door as well as the walls. At night, with the window which occupied almost one wall, wide open to the sky, she would lie, warmly cocooned in eccentric luxury, feeling that she was drawn up in her bright capsule to float under the stars.

She guarded her privacy. None of her friends and no one from the Agency had ever been in the flat. Adventures occurred eke-where. She knew that if any man shared that narrow bed for her it would mean commitment. There was only one man she ever pictured there and he was a Commander of New Scotland Yard. She knew that he, too, lived in the City; they shared the same river. But she told herself that the brief madness was over, that at a time of stress and frightening insecurity she had only been seeking for her lost father-figure. There was this to be said for a smattering of amateur psychology: it enabled one to exorcize memories which might otherwise be embarrassing.

A narrow ledge with a parapet ran outside all the windows, wide enough for rows of pots of herbs and geraniums and for a single deckchair in summer. Underneath were warehouses and offices, mysterious businesses symbolized rather than identified by a double row of ancient name-plates. By day the building had a secretive, many-tongued and sometimes raucous life. But by five o'clock this began to seep away and, at night, it held a vast, almost unbroken silence. One of the tenant firms imported spices. To Cordelia, climbing up to her flat at the end of the day, that pungent, alien smell permeating the stairs represented security, comfort, her first real home.

The most onerous part of the preparation for this new case was deciding which clothes to pack. In her more puritanical moments Cordelia despised women who spent an inordinate amount of time and money on their appearance. Such a total preoccupation with externals must, she felt, argue a need to compensate for some deficiency at the heart of personality. But she was quick to recognize that her own interest in clothes and make-up, although spasmodic, was intense while it lasted and that she had never known the state of not in the least caring how she looked. In this, as in all matters, she preferred to travel light and the whole of her wardrobe could be comfortably accommodated within one cupboard and three drawers which were fitted along the wall of her bedroom. She opened them now and considered what would be necessary for a weekend which, apart from detection, might offer anything from sailing and rock-climbing to amateur theatricals. The creamy-fawn pleated skirt in fine wool and the matching cashmere two-piece, both bought at Harrods in the July sale, should, she felt, take care of most occasions; the cashmere's understated extravagance might, with luck, inspire confidence in the Agency's prosperity. If the warm weather held, her brown corduroy knickerbockers might be warm for sleuthing or walking but they were tough and she liked the jerkin and jacket, either of which looked good with them. Jeans and a couple of cotton tops were an obvious choice as was her Guernsey. The evenings were more difficult. Few people now dressed for dinner but this was a castle, Ambrose Gorringe might well be an eccentric, and anything was possible. She would need something cool and reasonably formal. In the end she packed her only long dress, in Indian cotton in subtle shades of pink, red and brown, and a pleated cotton skirt with matching top.

She turned with relief to the more straightforward business of checking her scene-of-crime kit. It was Bernie who had first devised it, basing it, she knew, on the kit issued to the Murder Squad of New Scotland Yard. His had been less comprehensive but all the essentials had been there: envelopes and tweezers for the collection of specimens, dusting powder for the detection of fingerprints, a Polaroid camera, a torch, fine rubber gloves, a magnifying glass, scissors and a sturdy penknife, a tin of plasticine for taking impressions of keys, test tubes with stoppers for the collection of blood samples. Bernie had pointed out that, ideally, these should hold a preservative and anti-clotting agent. Neither had ever been necessary then or now. Rescuing lost cats, shadowing errant husbands, tracing runaway teenagers had required persistence, good feet, comfortable footwear and infinite tact rather than the esoteric lore which Bernie had so enjoyed teaching her, compensating, in those long summer sessions in Epping Forest of stalking, tracking, physical combat and even gun lore, for his own professional failure, trying to recreate through Pryde's Agency the lost hierarchical and fascinating world of the Metropolitan CID.

She had made only a few alterations to the kit since Bernie's death, dispensing with the original case and using instead a canvas shoulder-bag fitted with inner pockets which she had bought in a store which sold ex-army equipment. And since her first case she had included an additional item, a long leather belt with a buckle, the belt with which that first victim had been hanged. She had no. wish to dwell on the case which had promised so much and had ended so tragically, one which had left her with its own legacy of guilt. But the belt had once saved her life and she recognized an almost superstitious attachment to it, justifying its inclusion with the thought that a length of strong leather always came in useful.

Lastly she took a manilla envelope file and wrote the name Clarissa lisle in capitals on the cover, taking care to make the letters neat and even. She had often thought that this was the most satisfying part of a new investigation, a moment of hope spiced with anticipatory excitement, the pristine folder and crisp lettering themselves symbolic of a fresh beginning. She glanced through her notebook before adding it to the folder. Except for Sir George and his briefly seen wife, her companions on the island were still only names, a roll-call of putative suspects: Simon Lessing, Roma Lisle, Rose Tolgarth, Ambrose Gorringe; Ivo Whittingham; sounds written on paper but holding the promise of discovery, of challenge, of the fascinating variety of human personality. And all of them, Clarissa Lisle's stepson, her cousin, her dresser, her host, her friend, circling like planets round that central golden figure.

She spread out the twenty-three quotations on the table to study them before filing them in the case folder in the order of their receipt by Miss Lisle. Then she took from her shelf her two volumes of quotations, the paperback Penguin Dictionary of Quotations and the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary. As she had expected, all the passages appeared in one or the other, all but three in the paperback. Almost certainly that had been the dictionary used; it could be bought in almost any bookshop and its size would make it easy to conceal and light to carry about. To select the quotations would take no great trouble or time, merely a look at the index under death or dying or a quick read through the forty-five pages devoted to the plays of Shakespeare, the two which covered Marlowe and Webster. And it would not be too difficult to discover which plays Clarissa Lisle had appeared in. She had been a member of the Malvern Repertory Company for three years and Shakespeare and the

Jacobean dramatists were its forte. Any programme note covering her career, then or later, would list her main appearances. But it was a safe bet that, given the exigencies of a Shakespearean production with the resources, of a medium-sized repertory company, she would have had at least a walking-on part in all the plays.

Only two of the quotations which she had tentatively identified as Webster were not in the Penguin Dictionary. But these could be found by studying the texts. All the quotations were familiar; she herself had had no difficulty in recognizing most of them even if she wasn't always sure of the play. But typing them accurately from memory was another matter. In each passage the lines were set out correctly and the punctuation was faultless; another reason for concluding that the typist had worked with the Penguin Dictionary at his or her elbow.

Next she studied them under her magnifying glass, wondering as she did so how much scientific attention the Metropolitan Police had thought it worth while to give them. As far as she could judge only three were typed on the same machine. The quality as well as the size of the letters varied; some were uneven, others faint or partly broken. The typing wasn't particularly expert; the work of someone who was used to a machine, perhaps for his own correspondence, but didn't type professionally. She thought that none had been typed on an electric typewriter. And who would have access to twenty different machines? Obviously someone who dealt in second-hand typewriters or someone who owned or worked in a secretarial school. It was unlikely to be a secretarial agency; the quality of the machines wasn't good enough. And it needn't necessarily be a secretarial school. Probably most modern comprehensives taught shorthand and typing; what was to prevent any member of the staff, whatever his or her subjects, from staying after school hours and making private use of the machines?

And there was another way in which the messages could have been produced and one which she thought the most likely. She had bought cheap second-hand machines for her own Agency, visiting the shops and showrooms where they were chained on display and trying them out, moving unhindered and unregarded from machine to machine. Anyone armed with a pad of paper and the Dictionary of Quotations could have provided himself – or herself- with a sufficient supply to keep the menace going, making a series of short visits to a variety of shops in districts where he was unlikely to be recognized. A reference to the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory would show him where to find them.

Before filing the messages in the folder she looked closely at the one which Sir George had told her had been typed on his machine. Was it her imagination that the skull and crossbones had been drawn by a different, a more careful, less assured ? Certainly the heads of the two crossing bones were differently shaped and slightly larger than in the other examples, the skull more broad. The differences were small, but she thought significant. The drawings of the other skulls and the coffin were practically identical. And the quotation itself, typed with erratic spacing of the letters, had no venom in its admonition:

On pain of death let no man name death to me: It is a word infinitely terrible.

It wasn't a quotation known to her and she couldn't find it in the Penguin Dictionary. Webster, she thought, rather than Shakespeare; perhaps The White Devil or The Devil's Law Case. The punctuation looked accurate enough although she would have expected a comma after the first word 'death'. Perhaps this quotation had been remembered not looked up; certainly it had been typed by a different and less expert hand. And she thought she knew whose.

The remaining quotations varied in the degree of their menace. Christopher Marlowe's bleak despair,

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, must we ever be could only doubtfully be described as a death threat although its stark contemporary nihilism might well be unwelcome to a nervous recipient. The only other Marlowe quotation, received six weeks earlier,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually!

was direct enough but the threat had proved baseless: Clarissa had lived out more than her hour. But it seemed to Cordelia that, since these earlier messages, the quotations had increased in menace, had been selected to build up to some kind of climax from the sinister threat typed underneath a coffin;

I wish you joy o' the worm

to the brutally explicit lines from King Henry VI:

Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither.

Seen together, the sonorous reiteration of death and hatred was oppressive, the silly childish drawings limned with menace. She began to understand what this carefully organized programme of intimidation might do to a sensitive and vulnerable woman, to any woman come to that, darkening the mornings, making terrible such ordinary events as the arrival of the post, a letter on the hall salver, a note pushed under the door. It was easy to advise the victim of a poison pen to flush the messages down the lavatory like the rubbish they were. But in all societies there was an atavistic fear of the malevolent power of a secret adversary, working for evil, willing one to failure, perhaps to death. There was a horrible and rather frightening intelligence at work here, and it wasn't pleasant to think that the person responsible might be one of that small group who would be with her on Courcy Island, that the eyes which would meet hers over the dining-table could be hiding such malignancy. For the first time she wondered whether Clarissa Lisle could be right, whether there really was a threat to her life. Then she put the thought aside, telling herself that the messages were beginning to exercise their malevolence even on her. A murderer did not advertise his intention over a period of months. But was that necessarily true? To a mind consumed with hatred, might not the act of killing be too swift, too momentary in its satisfaction? Could Clarissa Lisle have an enemy so bitter that he needed to watch her suffer, to destroy her slowly with terror and failure before he moved in for the kill?

She shivered. The warmth of the day was already dissipating, the night air, drifting through the open window, even in this city eyrie held die taste and tang of autumn. She put away the last message and closed the folder. Her own instructions had been clear, to safeguard Clarissa Lisle from any worry or distress before Saturday's performance of The Duchess of Malfi and, if possible, to discover who was sending her the messages. And that, to the best of her ability, she would do.