A Very Persistent Illusion

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Martin, though it is not clear for which (if any) aspects of my life he feels personally responsible.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I say. I turn to Virginia. ‘I’d really hoped it was some other Malcolm Biggenhalgh. As long as we thought he was alive, it had to be some other Malcolm Biggenhalgh. Conversely, once I knew he was dead . . .’ There’s a further silence during which I add philosophically: ‘It’s a funny old world.’ Everyone nods because, actually, it is.

  ‘My father should never have been there at all,’ says Martin. ‘He’d been working too many shifts as it was. He agreed to do that one at the last minute . . .’

  Martin’s wife chooses this moment to appear at the door. We all turn and look at her. She is clearly unsure of the etiquette for being introduced to your late father-in-law’s love child. She smiles sweetly at each of us in turn.

  ‘Well,’ she says brightly, ‘I should think you must all be ready for a nice cup of tea?’

  I nod and, at the same time, realize that I have again told the story of the crash without mentioning Neils in any way. I wonder exactly what will be needed to happen to make that thing possible. Maybe if I just told everyone now, very, very quickly and without thinking about it in advance?

  ‘Ah yes, tea,’ I say. ‘I’d love some tea.’

  20

  London, 1752

  The Hostess moved through the crowded room, bearing a delicate porcelain cup in her small white hand. Her eyes tracked the progress of a footman carrying a teapot, followed closely by a maid who was carefully holding a silver tray on which were sugar, milk and a tea-strainer. Observing that all was as it should be, at least for the moment, she pressed on to the far side of the room where one of her guests sat alone, though his bulk made him as prominent as any object in the room. Mr (not yet Dr) Johnson had placed himself defiantly in a large armchair, daring any of those assembled to speak to him. The Hostess smiled sweetly.

  ‘Mr Johnson, is there nobody here worthy of your attention?’

  ‘Madam, there are many here who are worthy of my attention, but I am worthy of nobody’s. I have brought the black dog with me on its leash and it sits here snarling.’

  The Hostess looked to the left and right of Mr Johnson’s chair to confirm that the dog in question was metaphorical rather than material.

  ‘Then I must call the Beadle to banish your dog from my drawing room, Mr Johnson,’ she said impishly, pleased to be able to exchange banter with the great man. ‘But who can fulfil that role, I wonder?’

  ‘Madam, you could if anyone could but, alas, today even you cannot.’

  ‘Then, sir, if I am not equal to the task, I must most certainly find somebody who is.’

  ‘You have surrounded me, madam, with hardened and shameless tea drinkers. I fear that I shall have little to say to them or they to me.’

  ‘There are many who have expressed a desire to converse with you.’

  Johnson shook his great bewigged head and stared at the ground.

  ‘You must miss your wife very much,’ she said.

  ‘Marriage has many pains but celibacy few pleasures. Yes, I miss her very much. She was older than I, but I had hoped she would outlive me.’

  The Hostess tried to remember how much older Johnson’s wife had been. Twenty years? He must always have known that the probability was that he would end up a widower, just as most women knew they could look forward to a long and contented widowhood. She tried another tack.

  ‘How is your great work progressing?’

  ‘Slowly. There is no quick way of writing a dictionary or at least none that I have found so far.’

  ‘It must give you much satisfaction, nevertheless.’

  ‘It is dull work, madam, very dull work.’

  The Hostess’s eyes scoured the room and lighted on precisely the right person, not a couple of yards away.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘you have not yet met His Grace. Mr Johnson, may I introduce you to His Grace the Bishop of Cloyne. Bishop, this is the celebrated Mr Samuel Johnson.’

  The Bishop, a serene and smooth-faced man in his sixties, turned his condescending gaze to the scowling lexicographer.

  ‘Good afternoon, Berkeley,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Good afternoon, Johnson,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘So you gentlemen do know each other then? That is excellent.’

  Neither said anything.

  ‘Or am I mistaken?’ asked the Hostess.

  ‘I know His Grace’s work,’ said Johnson.

  ‘I know a little of Mr Johnson’s work,’ said Bishop Berkeley with a sniff.

  ‘I know more than enough of His Grace’s work,’ said Johnson.

  Then I’ll just leave you boys to play together, thought the Hostess.

  ‘If you will excuse me, gentlemen,’ she said, ‘I regret that I must tear myself away for just a moment from your lighthearted banter.’

  They both bowed to the departing lady, and squared up to each other. Johnson leaned back in his chair and tugged at his greasy and capacious wig with podgy fingers.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘I understand, sir, that you deny the existence of matter.’

  George Berkeley, still standing, sighed a prim clerical sigh. ‘No, I do not deny the existence of matter, as anyone would know if they read any of my books with care. I do not deny the reality of that which is perceived by our senses, but we do not see the causes of colours or hear the causes of sounds. We see colours and we hear sounds, which are merely qualities of the things themselves. Things exist only to the extent that we perceive them to exist. Esse est percipi.’

  ‘So, it’s all in my mind?’

  ‘Take heat,’ said Berkeley, sidestepping the grubby contents of a lexicographer’s mind. ‘Now, as you know, if you put your right hand in cold water and the left one in hot water then place them both in tepid water, the water will feel hot to the right hand and cold to the left. But the water cannot be hot and cold simultaneously. The water is neither hot nor cold except that you perceive it to be so.’

  ‘So, sir, the existence of an unperceived object is an impossibility.’

  ‘In theory, yes.’

  ‘Very well, sir, I may perceive the tiles on the roof of a church, but not the beams that hold them in place. By your reckoning the tiles should then come crashing down because the beams do not exist.’

  ‘God sees the beams,’ said Berkeley, ‘so they continue to hold His roof up.’

  ‘And the roof of a house of ill-repute?’

  ‘God is omnipresent.’

  ‘Rarely,’ said Johnson, ‘have I heard such nonsense.’

  ‘There are those that I would recognize as great men, and I hope whom you would recognize as great men, whose writings would support my contentions.’

  ‘It is the fate of great men, sir, to have their persons and their ideas ludicrously caricatured by lesser writers who come after them. It may happen to us too. But as for your theory of the non-existence of matter, I refute it thus.’ Johnson lashed out with his right foot at the heavy table by his side.

  ‘Ouch,’ he added.

  21

  In Which our Hero Makes Some Interesting Discoveries

  The following day I am sent on my rounds once more – the undertaker, the crematorium, the florist. On my return, Virginia silently steers me into the sitting room. She closes the door quickly and conspiratorially. I wonder if she will peek round the net curtains to check that nobody can overhear us in the street, but she pulls me to the far side of the room, away from what I can only assume are her mother’s ears.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Mum,’ she says.

  This does not, on the face of it, appear to be a secret worth dragging me into the sitting room for.

  ‘And?’ I ask.

  ‘I gave her the third degree to find out whether she knew Hugh was sending money to Malcolm and his family. I asked her if it could be blackmail.’ She makes it sound as though this is fairly standard domestic conversation.
Maybe it is from now on.

  We had broken the news to her the previous evening of Malcolm’s marriage, his death and his family’s move to Horsham. She had received the news philosophically; though you could tell that she was disappointed that Malcolm would not be there to admire her new hat. Virginia had obviously taken discussions further in my absence.

  ‘Did she know anything?’ I say.

  ‘She just looked puzzled and said he couldn’t possibly have done. Paying my school fees was hard enough. There wouldn’t have been anything left to send to Malcolm. And she couldn’t understand why he would. She said she was sure Martin was wrong.’

  ‘He could be,’ I say. ‘Don’t forget that these overheard conversations took place years ago when he was six or seven – and he never dared discuss it with his mother after the first time.’

  Virginia is silent, then says: ‘It’s funny, but it does sort of ring true. When I was younger, I always felt guilty about how much the school fees must be costing my parents. They would have been less then than they are now, but they were still quite hefty. Most of the girls at school lived in much grander houses than we did, and some were clearly pretty loaded. My father was a middle manager at a small company in London.’

  ‘People make sacrifices . . .’ I begin.

  ‘But my parents didn’t really,’ she says. ‘We never seemed short of cash – it’s just that we didn’t have a really big house or splash money around. I wondered sometimes if we were very rich but didn’t want people to know. But that didn’t seem too likely.’

  I agree this was improbable. Rich people, in my experience, splash it about a bit. ‘Do you know how much he left your mother?’

  ‘She’s being fairly cagey about that. I don’t get the impression there are any problems. The solicitor is dealing with it.’

  ‘If Malcolm had been blackmailing Hugh,’ I say, ‘do you think Hugh would have kept any letters from him or anything?’

  ‘All gone, if he did,’ says Virginia. ‘He had apparently told my mother that, if anything happened to him (as they say), he wanted her to get rid of all his personal papers straight away. He didn’t want them cluttering up the house for her, he said.’

  ‘Very thoughtful. And so she . . .’

  ‘Put them out for the recycling people, who collected them yesterday.’

  I obviously do rush to the door just in case I can be fast enough to get there yesterday, but the green recycling box is empty except for a couple of take-away menus.

  ‘There’s nothing for it,’ says Virginia. ‘You are going to have to take my mother to one side, be frank with her, use all of your cunning, and get her to tell us exactly what happened.’

  I carry out a quick inventory of my skills and assess my likelihood of success.

  ‘Let’s just get her drunk,’ I suggest.

  Virginia carries out a similar assessment of my competence. ‘How much Bailey’s is left?’ she asks.

  ‘There’s an unopened bottle in the cupboard,’ I say.

  Virginia opens the door. ‘Mum,’ she calls invitingly, ‘do you feel like a drink?’

  * * *

  It is late afternoon and I have got Daphne as drunk as I reasonably can. It is becoming clear that this was not a good plan. She is willing to tell us anything, but can no longer distinguish between truth and fantasy.

  ‘Hugh was a good man,’ she tells us for the tenth time. ‘A good man. A good man. He was . . . who are we talking about?’

  ‘Hugh,’ I say.

  ‘He was a good man,’ she says.

  Virginia is surprisingly not impressed. I am obliged to point out that it was a joint decision to get Daphne drunk. She points out that her first vote was that I did something useful for once. This is technically true, but . . .

  I try again. ‘Daphne, did Hugh never say why he sacked Malcolm?’

  ‘He was a good man,’ says Daphne.

  ‘Hugh or Malcolm?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Daphne.

  ‘Would anyone else know why he sacked him?’

  ‘Hume,’ says Daphne.

  I mishear this as ‘Hugh’ the first time, which adds to the confusion, but she repeats the name.

  ‘Hume?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Daphne, ‘just joking. Hume knows nothing.’ She laughs.

  I look at Virginia. She shrugs as if to say I’ve blown it and can’t expect her to rescue me. I want to point out that this is her mother, not mine, but first I must focus on the job in hand.

  ‘What doesn’t Hume know?’ I ask wearily. Daphne’s eyes are closing slowly, and I’m not entirely sure Hume really exists other than in her imagination.

  ‘Carbon paper,’ says Daphne, as though she has suddenly woken up. She laughs. ‘He really was a stupid man.’ Then she adds, ‘I’m not feeling very well. You’ll have to excuse me,’ and leaves the room quite quickly. It’s a while before she returns, and by then she seems to have sobered up a little and to be more wary.

  ‘Carbon paper?’ I ask.

  But Daphne looks at me blankly. ‘What are you on about?’ she asks. ‘Nobody uses carbon paper these days.’

  ‘Look, Mum,’ says Virginia, ‘why don’t you have a little rest?’

  Daphne agrees she might as well. Once she has gone, I assume I am in for an earful on the subject of ineffective detective work, but this is not what Virginia wishes to talk to me about. When her mother is clearly out of radar range she says: ‘You realize we were onto something there?’

  ‘We? I think I was asking the questions.’

  ‘You may have asked the question, but you did not understand the answer.’

  ‘Carbon paper?’

  ‘No, I don’t know what she meant by that either, but she realized she had let something slip and was rattled.’

  ‘But, carbon paper?’

  ‘Forget the stationery order. I’ve remembered who Hume was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was one of the directors of the insurance company Hugh and Malcolm worked for.’

  ‘That’s hardly letting slip a major secret.’

  ‘But he might know why Hugh sacked Malcolm. Mum pretty well told us he did.’

  ‘If we can track him down,’ I add. ‘Once your mother’s sober, she’ll deny ever having heard of him.’

  We turn immediately to Hugh’s address book. A Colin Hume is listed.

  ‘Hugh wrote this years ago,’ I say. ‘Look – that dialling code must have changed in the eighties.’

  ‘But you can easily find the new code.’

  ‘He may have moved. He could be dead. It figures that he was older than Hugh,’ I point out.

  ‘That’s what you’re going to find out,’ says Virginia, thrusting the book into my hands. ‘And there’s no time like the present.’

  ‘Why me?’ I ask.

  ‘It’ll make him suspicious if I phone,’ she says.

  I have already finished dialling before I realize that this last remark is total crap. Then somebody answers the phone. ‘Colin Hume speaking.’ A two-minute conversation and we have fixed to see him later the same evening. That was easy.

  No, actually, that was too easy. He wants to see us at least as much as we want to see him.

  * * *

  Another day, another semi – this time in Dorking.

  Colin Hume proves to have the sort of piercing gaze that might worry you if you had anything to hide. In his middle age, which is to say some years ago, it must have been a very formidable gaze indeed. Even now, you wouldn’t want to get in the way of it unless you had to, as we currently do. His hair is almost white and the thin strands look silky but tired. He retains a mild Scottish accent; my guess is he still supports the Scottish national rugby team but only so long as he can do it from an armchair in Dorking. He gives the impression of being quite happy and he probably is. If we have anything to offer him, it’s not that much. The question is: does he have anything to offer us, and, if so, will he do it?

  He sits us down, considerately m
oderates the intensity of the gaze for a bit, and pours us tea. This makes me very nervous. Over the past few days, nice hot drinks have usually been linked closely to shattering revelations. I try to cross my fingers as I pick up the plain white bone-china cup.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for some years for this,’ he says cheerfully, as if we have just offered to take him to the funfair. ‘Mostly I thought I’d go to my grave not knowing the answer – and when you began by telling me Hugh was dead – my sincere condolences, by the way, Virginia – I was pretty certain that he’d taken the secret with him. But, then again, maybe not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘We were hoping you’d tell us stuff rather than the other way round.’ Still, I give him a bit of the story so far, while he just nods and occasionally reaches for one of the jammy dodgers, which are on a plate much closer to him than to us.

  ‘I can tell you some things that you don’t know,’ he says. ‘Back in the days when Hugh and Malcolm worked for me I was the director responsible for finance. All finance directors are a bit paranoid about fraud, but I was pretty certain I had one on my hands. It’s like a bicycle tyre going flat – you may not know where the rusty nail has gone in, but you know fine you’ve got a puncture. We were overspending in all sorts of little ways, but it was when I looked at the stationery budget that I started to get worried. Insurance companies produced masses of paperwork in those days, so if you could skim off a few per cent it was worth the effort. These days I’d go for the IT budget. A few fake invoices for “software support” or operating-system licences aren’t likely to be questioned outside the IT department itself. In those days it was . . . oh, just as an example . . . carbon paper or typewriter ribbons. If somebody queried the rising costs of non-existent orders you could just say: “Those useless girls in the typing pool – they use a sheet of carbon paper once and then throw it away. I’ll have word with the supervisor,” and then take credit for the saving and switch the swindle elsewhere. Anyway, for a few months I just monitored the stationery budget, and one or two others, very quietly. I was almost there when I stupidly took Hugh into my confidence to see if he knew anything. Then, young idiot that I was, I went off on leave, having asked him to do a bit of a snoop round. When I got back, he’d fired Malcolm. Hugh said he’d confronted him with it, Malcolm had admitted the fraud and Hugh had sacked him on the spot but “to protect the good name of the firm” had not reported it to the police. Malcolm had left quickly, present whereabouts unknown and unknowable. When I asked whether he’d had any accomplices, Hugh just looked blank and said that he hadn’t really asked him. I was furious, but there was nothing to be done. In fact the losses did stop suddenly at that point, though that wasn’t the end of the story. Later I picked up a number of cases where – how shall I put it? – we had unaccountably given our suppliers a better deal than they might have expected. I suspected somebody was taking a cut, but was never able to prove who it was. Hugh never seemed short of money – private school fees and all that – but he just said an aunt had died and left him a legacy. Do you know which aunt that might have been?’