Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  ‘But we thought you knew!’

  ‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘It was more in the way of a lucky shot in the dark.’

  ‘Well, that is rather rotten of you,’ said Fiona. But the two of them looked at each other conspiratorially.

  ‘Well?’ I said, waiting.

  ‘Well,’ said Timothy, ‘we’re both of us, in a way, reacting against Hexton, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said. ‘I’ve already said that, and it was pretty predictable. What I wanted to know was the precise form your reactions were taking.’

  ‘Fiona, you see, has this friend. Lover. He works on a fairground—travels all the seaside places in the North during the summer, jobs with a circus during the winter. Sort of gipsy bloke, you know.’

  ‘Madly exciting,’ said Fiona, flashing her eyes from beneath her shaded head. ‘Sort of exotic—foreign, sweaty, and not like anything I’ve ever known. Of course, in the nature of things it’s not likely to be more than a fling . . . ’

  ‘You disappoint me. Do you mean you’re going to land up eventually with a young stockbroker type? Pinstripes and fast cars and the Young Conservatives’ Ball?’

  ‘Well, I suppose it may come to that. Mummy is very persistent, in her soft kind of way, and of course I like my comforts. Love in a caravan can be exciting—Golly! I never knew how exciting caravans could be!—but you wouldn’t want it when you’re forty-five, I shouldn’t imagine. But at least I’ll have the memory, won’t I? And if it doesn’t by any chance fizzle out naturally, well, I’ll let it dawn on Mummy and Daddy lightly . . . And Timothy, of course, has what one might call a tendresse.’

  ‘An attachment,’ said Timothy. ‘You make it sound so Barbara Cartland. An attachment. I met him at this pub in Darlington that I . . . we go to. He’s a major at the barracks. I think I represent something he can’t find among the recruits.’

  ‘I can imagine. I suppose he himself is minor public school, with a Profile?’

  ‘Something like that,’ admitted Timothy.

  ‘Well, in the nature of things you’re going to have to say something to your father about that. ’

  ‘Oh, do you think so? My idea was just to cover it up—my tastes, I mean—until I’m financially independent. That won’t be long now. Then I can get a flat somewhere or other, and leave the tyrannical old shit. He killed my mother, you know.’

  ‘By driving her to drink?’

  ‘Exactly. It was drink or suicide for her. He left her no room for any personality of her own. When she’d finally died, I looked at him, over her body, to say: I know. And he . . . well, you know what he is . . . he wilfully misunderstood. What line he cares to take after I move out about my tastes, if he hears of them, I don’t much care. I doubt I’ll want to see anything much of him. I’ll have a life of my own at last.’

  It struck me that Timothy and Fiona’s rebellions against the stifling conventions of Hexton were of a distinctly cool and calculating nature. Perhaps it was in the nature of a Hexton upbringing that that should be so. Certainly there seemed to be no burning of bridges for these two: play safe until you’re firmly on the opposite shore. I had a fair degree of sympathy for Timothy, because I knew enough about the nature of his father to see what an intolerable home life he must have had. Fiona’s rebellion was against a pair whom I had always regarded as reasonably amiable old fuddies, but I did have to admit that I knew nothing at all about the sort of home life they might have created for her.

  ‘You will keep the secret for a bit, won’t you?’ Fiona said, wheedling, with something of a return to her old ingénue manner. ‘I mean, it will be so much better if it comes out ever so gradually . . . so that they wonder, then they have doubts, then they worry, and so on—you know.’

  I assured her that I had no interest in doing an ‘I thought you ought to know’ to her parents, and they went off towards town, resuming quite without effort their Broken Blossoms routine. When I got to the Westons it was clear that the process of wondering had begun already. From behind the curtains of the front room Mrs Weston’s eyes were following them, heavy with maternal worry. When she opened the front door, she watched them as they turned towards the town centre, and said:

  ‘I really don’t know what’s got into those two.’

  ‘Lovers’ tiff, I expect,’ I said, comfortably.

  ‘You noticed? It’s so unlike them. Always so wrapped up in each other, it’s been a joy to watch them.’

  Positively puke-making, in my view, but there’s no accounting for tastes, particularly maternal ones.

  ‘One never actually marries one’s first love, not if one is wise,’ I said. It was a most unpopular thing to say.

  ‘You don’t mean you thought that the quarrel was that serious, did you?’ Mrs Weston’s face was all screwed up with anguish at the thought. ‘Oh, I do hope not. Such a nice boy. So suitable. Nothing special socially, of course, but so pleasant and respectful, so nice-looking, so presentable . . . I really have set my heart on their getting married.’

  I looked at her as she ushered me towards their little drawingroom. This, I thought, was the New Snobbery. You didn’t worry any more about family, about daddy’s income, or the size of the ancestral seat; you worried about how he would look in the wedding photographs, about presentability, about glossy surfaces. Timothy’s appeal for her was that you could take him anywhere. I had to admit that Mrs Weston seemed a much sillier woman than I had thought, and the New Snobbery quite as unattractive as the old.

  You had to hand it to Fiona, though: she really did seem to have gone the whole hog with her boyfriend. A gipsy circus-hand seemed to represent the diametrical opposite of every standard that Mrs Weston held most dear. He was the sort of man you could take nowhere. Exciting, I imagined, for Fiona.

  In the drawing-room Colonel Weston was sitting in his armchair, presiding over a silver-covered dish and the usual Hexton array of flowery china. He floundered to his feet and made various inarticulate noises of commiseration, then sank down again like a sea creature that is only happy on the ocean bed.

  Mrs Weston presided fluffily, though I could see that the worry about Fiona and Timothy was still at the back of her mind. The muffins were shop-y, which was disappointing, but warmth and butteriness go quite a way, and I tucked into them.

  We talked for a bit about neutral things. Father Battersby’s first service had been a great success: all the odds and bobs of a High Church celebration had gone down extremely well, rather like suddenly acquiring a colour television after you’ve only been used to black and white. According to Colonel Weston several people had said afterwards that it was nice to have something to look at, and something to smell, so that you weren’t ‘thrown in on yourself’, as one member of the congregation expressed it. Personally Father Battersby was going down very well, though his habit of making tactless remarks had not quite left him: he had referred to his intention of doing something ‘when Mrs Primp is out of the way’, but he had done so to one of the few local people to regret her departure—her dressmaker, if you’ll believe she had one.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Weston, with traditional military gruffness, ‘the more he gets to know people, the less he’ll make mistakes like that—eh? And poor old Thyrza left yesterday, you know.’

  ‘Of course—Wednesday,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like the end of an era,’ said Mrs Weston pensively. She really was a very silly woman.

  ‘That, at any rate, is what she would like people to feel,’ I said. ‘With Mary Morse waiting in the wings to take over, unasked and unwanted, the position of honorary vicar’s wife, I doubt if we shall notice any difference. Unless Father Battersby puts up a fight against her pretensions, and nips them in the bud.’

  ‘Rather think he will,’ said Colonel Weston. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t enjoy a scrap. Born fighter—eh?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Anyway, not a smoother over, like Marcus. It was about Marcus that I wanted to talk.’

 
They both shifted uneasily in their seats, but then everyone I spoke to did that. I thought we’d got that disagreeable topic out of the way, they all seemed to want to say.

  ‘Of course, my dear,’ said Nancy Weston, looking slightly abstracted. ‘But I really don’t see what we can tell you.’

  ‘Well, for a start, you were both among the last to see him alive.’

  ‘Well, yes, we were that. But there really wasn’t anything special about that. I mean, he just went off. As we told the Superintendent, it was time for us to take over, and we did so. Then Marcus just went off.’

  ‘Quickly?’

  ‘Yes, he was walking fairly fast.’

  ‘After someone?’

  ‘The Superintendent asked that. But we just didn’t notice, did we, Frank? We were checking the equipment, and I was seeing to the cash box, and then we had a customer, so we simply didn’t notice. One minute he was there with us, the next he was gone.’

  ‘So you didn’t notice anything special about him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, did we, dear?’

  ‘Same as usual—sure of it.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything unusual?’

  ‘No, really, dear: we’d have told the police if he had, naturally.’

  ‘Did you take over from him on the Test Your Strength game several times in the course of the day?’

  ‘Oh yes. He had a tea-break about twelve. That was just twenty minutes or so, and he collected a cup and went down to the river with his pipe. Then he had another break—when was it, dear?—round about two. He went into the tent: probably you saw him?’

  ‘Yes, I did. So you saw him fairly often, whenever you took over from him, or he took over from you. Was he always his usual self when you talked to him? Nothing upsetting him, or anything?’

  ‘I think so—don’t you, dear?’

  ‘There was that time—’ began Colonel Weston in his usual inarticulate way.

  ‘When, dear?’

  ‘After he’d been in the tent. You remember.’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t think that was anything, dear. It was after that second spell off, when you saw him. And when he came back he did seem very thoughtful—sort of preoccupied. And Frank said—what did you say, dear?’

  ‘Don’t remember exactly. Thought something had gone wrong in the tent. Thought one of those damned women—beg y’pardon, m’dear—thought one of those women must have had a slanging match with Father B, or something. So I said, “All Quiet on the Western Front?” or something of the sort. And he said, “Oh yes, perfectly quiet. Everything going very nicely indeed.” ’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘I think so. I said, “No need for us to do anything, then?” and he replied: “No need at all” . . . No, wait, I lie. He said: “No need to do anything at all. Not about that.” ’

  ‘He didn’t explain?’

  ‘No. He was still a bit quiet and thoughtful, so we drifted off, didn’t we, Nance, saying we’d be back in good time to take over again at three-thirty.’

  I sat in a trance, and let them talk on. Mrs Weston was very good at talking on—covering over, she thought, any little social awkwardnesses. I was thinking over those words: ‘Not about that.’ I was remembering back to that scene in the tent, the last time I had seen Marcus alive, the last time I had talked to him. How casual, brusque, unthinking I had been—I had thought about that often since. We had held hands under the table, I remembered, but then I had left with hardly a goodbye. But what had we talked about, what had been going on around us?

  I conjured up pictures, scraps of conversation—straining my mind back through the five days of grief since it had happened. What had I seen in those minutes, what had I heard? And yet, of course, what I had seen was not necessarily what Marcus had seen. He was a good five inches taller than me. I remembered that I had not noticed until late in the afternoon that Howard Culpepper had a stall two or three down from mine. On the other hand, probably what Marcus had heard must have been pretty much what I myself heard.

  I pulled myself together with a start. Nancy Weston was talking to me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all, dear. I was just saying that I’d heard you were intending to leave Hexton.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh yes. I think so.’

  ‘Damned shame,’ said Colonel Weston. ‘After all you and Marcus have done for the place.’

  Only a man of Colonel Weston’s gallantry could have included me in that sentence.

  ‘It’s understandable you should want to get away,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I really haven’t thought. I haven’t had time to find out what money there will be, let alone think about looking for a job. With the job situation at the moment, I should think genteel poverty and genteel unemployment are likely to be my lot, but I’ll investigate one or two possibilities. I suppose first I’ll go and stay with Mother.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Nancy Weston in her wet way. ‘She’s a widow, isn’t she? You’ll be company for each other.’

  ‘For a time, I suppose. But we both have our own ways, and two generations in the same house never really works, does it?’

  ‘She’s quite an old lady?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I was a youngest child. She’s getting rather forgetful, and living mostly in the past. Things have changed too much for her in recent years, and she doesn’t like it. When I tell her the price of anything she asks: “What’s that in real money?” Within a week or two of my going back she’ll be telling me to eat up my nice greens. No, it won’t work for very long . . . ’

  Mrs Weston was beginning to say something anodyne, when suddenly something clicked. Just as something had at Mary’s, but this was a definite click—confusing but definite. A connection. Yet what on earth could the connection mean? I stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve just thought of something—something rather important. I think I’d better be getting home.’

  And that’s what I did, leaving three muffins congealing in their own butter. I said my farewells to the Westons, had no impulse to satisfy the wondering expression on Nancy Weston’s face, and walked rapidly up and down the wynds of Hexton, thinking furiously, seeing nobody and nothing, until I arrived home—all the time wondering what on earth could come of that click, what conceivable relevance it could have.

  CHAPTER 16

  SEEING THE LIGHT

  By the oddest of coincidences I received a further less confusing revelation soon after I got home. When I opened the door, Jasper behaved, as usual, as if I had left him without food and water to go on a fortnight’s package tour, so as always I gave way to the guilt feelings he intends to inspire and allowed him a few throws of the ball in the garden. When we both got tired of that, I went into the sitting-room and turned on the television. Marcus used to think against a background of music, I do it against a background of television. He frequently had only the vaguest of ideas what he had been listening to (‘Was it Mozart? Yes, I’m sure it was Mozart,’ he would say, when I knew it had been Vaughan Williams), and similarly quiz game or soap opera glided slippily from one side of my mind to the other and out, without leaving any distinct memory (which is perhaps the idea behind them).

  Today, however, the first image to come up on the screen seized my mind. It was the five-forty news, and as usual the first item was the miners’ strike—for the country was going through one of its regular large-scale industrial upheavals. There was uproar coming from the set, as there had been the night before, and would be the night after: there were pictures of running battles, as overweight thugs hurled whatever came to hand at the police, and police did thorough jobs with their truncheons whenever they thought (wrongly) that they were out of sight of a television camera. It was a depressing spectacle, and I was about to switch off when the picture changed to one of an official of the South Yorkshire Miners’ Executive—a white collar spokesman, though he didn’t in fact wear a white collar, or a tie. He immediately
launched into the familiar routine: ‘Our members, subjected to extreme police violence and intimidation, launched a limited retaliatory action . . . reminiscent of a Fascist dictatorship . . . police state . . . rights of the working people of this country to pursue traditional trade union picketing in a peaceful manner . . . ’

  It was done with a Pecksniffian relish, a delighted going-through-the-motions, that did not want or expect to be believed. And the person going through the motions was Mary Morse’s brother John. No doubt about it. The beard did not disguise the sly, resentful face; the relish might have been directed, through the camera, at Mary, at her dead mother, and at the whole edifice of Morsism.

  No question now why Mary wanted to keep quiet about her younger brother. Not bankruptcy or lunacy, but militant trade unionism, more shameful than either, and more hideously culpable in Hexton’s eyes, because embraced quite voluntarily. I resolved on the morrow to spread myself through town, asking everyone: ‘Did you see Mary’s brother on the telly last night? Wasn’t he good?’

  Or would I, perhaps, have something still more pressing to do on the morrow?

  I fed Jasper, got something—anything—marked ‘For One’ out of the freezer, then settled down with a little notebook on the sofa. Only by writing things down could I bring some sort of order to the confusion. Because, though I was learning things, though I was remembering things, still the various pieces did not seem to be fitting into the same jigsaw. I had gone at the case with too many preconceptions. On the one hand there was the jigsaw labelled ‘Hexton—’ the public and private faces of the town, its dated customs, its mealy-mouthed morality, its collapsing series of façades. On the other hand, there seemed to be another jigsaw . . .

  I took my pen, and on a blank sheet of paper wrote:

  Change

  Jasper was restive, and managing to throw balls for himself. He had jumped over and across me several times before I had thought through the implications of that one word. When I had, I pondered again, and wrote down the word: