An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  ‘Because she does.’

  I hadn’t got anything else booked until my meeting – or should I say ‘interview’ – with Ingrid Richards. I reminded myself to check her out on Wikipedia when I got back. Alexandra had said her mother was famous, and the name did ring a distant bell, so I should at least do some basic research.

  But when I reached home, I got diverted by the bloody invoices – not too many overdue, but they still needed doing. I am actually quite organized, and the accountant rarely has to bully me about paperwork. I’m good with money and got better with it when I was looking after the business side of Oliver’s work. But I cannot claim that I find it the most interesting part of the job. I dream of a time when SpaceWoman might have a finance director, but I know it’s never going to happen. I’m a one-woman band and, actually, I’m not sure that I’d like being joined by other musicians.

  Being at home somehow made me think about ringing Ben, and round four thirty I gave in to the temptation.

  I got his voicemail. As I had done the last few times I’d tried. I left a message, ‘Wondering what planet you’re on. Contact mother ship. Lots of love.’

  I didn’t ask what I wanted to ask. ‘Are you all right? Or are you depressed?’

  I don’t enjoy worrying about Ben as much as I do. He’s a grown man, for God’s sake. And he seemed currently to have an ongoing girlfriend. Tracey. I know how some mothers react to their precious sons developing girlfriends, but I can honestly say I wasn’t at all jealous. I was just glad he’d got someone.

  And I didn’t mind him not ringing me if he was spending all his time with her. If he was happy.

  If he was happy …?

  Fleur had been right … as she had an annoying habit of sometimes being right, just when I was getting most exasperated with her. It did worry me that Ben hadn’t introduced Tracey.

  Such thoughts – and the invoices – preoccupied me. When I next checked the time, I realized I was in danger of being late for my rendezvous – interview? – in Brighton. I rushed out of the house.

  FIVE

  ‘Do you drink whiskey?’ Ingrid Richards demanded as soon as I got through the door. ‘I start drinking whiskey at six p.m. It is my aim not to drink any earlier in the day. That’s an ambition in which I frequently fail.’

  ‘I’ll have a glass with you. Thank you,’ I said.

  Normally, as I say, on my first visit to a client’s home, I would wear sharp-proof gloves, never knowing what level of squalor or safety I would be faced with. But I was glad I hadn’t put them on for Ingrid. It was clear that, at this stage at least, she wanted our meeting to have the appearance of a purely social encounter.

  The first thing that struck me about Ingrid Richards was her face. Though fine-boned, rather beautiful in shape, under a layer of freckles its skin was criss-crossed by a thousand tiny lines. It looked like old leather. It was the face of someone who had spent a lot of time exposed to the sun in hot countries and whose constant smoking had contributed to the tanning process.

  On her forehead there was a scar. At least two inches long, the wound that had left it must have been deep. Maybe the kind of gash you get from hitting the windscreen in a car crash?

  There was a Gauloise hanging from her lips when she opened the door. It stayed there as she gestured me to an armchair and went across to the open kitchen area to organize the drinks. The flat was on the eastern side of the square. The tall windows offered a good view of the sea. A May evening, sun sparkling on the water with a promise of summer.

  Around the room I saw a collage of exotic items. On the walls hung Russian icons, Islamic ceramic tiles, silk pictures and tapestries. On shelves and other surfaces stood a samovar, a folding Koran stand, brass bowls, trays and candlesticks, chased silver boxes and Ottoman vases. I remembered Alexandra telling me that her mother had lived ‘all over the bloody world’.

  ‘I drink my whiskey neat,’ Ingrid called across to me. ‘Do you want ice or water or anything else with it?’

  ‘Happy with it neat,’ I replied.

  I don’t dislike spirits, just very rarely drink them. In fact, I like most alcohol and there have been times in my life – certainly my ‘ladette’ late twenties – when I drank far too much of the stuff. A lot of drinking was involved when I first got together with Oliver too, mostly red wine back then. The genuine reason for my current moderation – as I keep telling my mother, though she never believes me – is that losing my licence would kill the SpaceWoman business stone dead.

  I’m also glad that the same fear stops me from drinking too much on my own at home. The occasional large Merlot and that’s it. I’ve seen from my work how easily the drinking can build up along with the hoarding. With sufficient alcohol in your system, you cease to notice the chaos of your surroundings. And, for a while, cease to feel the pain of whatever started you hoarding in the first place.

  Reading between the lines of what Alexandra told me, I’d deduced that her mother would chat more freely to someone she was having a drink with, and had planned the evening accordingly. I left the Yeti at home and came by train. There’s a rackety service that runs along the coast from Portsmouth Harbour to Brighton, stopping conveniently at Chichester – and at more South Coast villages than you would imagine a cartographer could invent. Most of them end with ‘ing’ – Angmering, Goring, Worthing, Lancing, et cetera. And, more importantly, there’s a station at Hove.

  Ingrid handed me whiskey in a squat, thick-bottomed glass. ‘Slánte!’ she said, clicking hers against mine before taking a grateful slurp.

  ‘Slánte!’ I echoed, following suit, mildly intrigued as to why she used the Irish toast. Though it was a while since I’d drunk the stuff, I was surprised by the taste. Sweeter than I was expecting.

  Ingrid read my reaction. ‘We’re drinking “whiskey” with an “e”,’ she explained. ‘Irish. Jameson’s.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said.

  She arranged her long limbs on a hard wooden chair, which she’d turned around to face away from her desk, on which an open laptop and an overspilling ashtray perched on layers of paper. A mixture of books, diaries, and browning newspaper clippings. These spread from the desktop over the floor, then into separate piles on other surfaces, in what a casual observer might have seen as chaos. Experience had told me, though, that it could well be an efficient personal filing system, whose originator could instantly find any relevant document. Untidiness does not always indicate lack of control.

  If that was how Ingrid Richards wanted to organize her work, fine. From the Health and Safety point of view, though, perhaps not so good.

  In spite of her weather-beaten skin and the scar, Ingrid remained a fine-looking woman. Casually dressed in a floppy white linen shirt and well-cut jeans, she certainly had style. And, though in her seventies, her long slender figure was almost girlish.

  Then there was the hair. Red. And the residual freckles suggested it had always been red. Surely no longer unaided, but she’d employed a highly skilled colourist.

  The more I saw of Ingrid Richards, the more familiar she looked. Alexandra had told me her mother was famous and I was kicking myself for not Wikipediaing her before I left home.

  Ingrid looked me directly in the eyes. I got the feeling she hadn’t got another way of looking at people. ‘Obviously, I know why you’re here,’ she said. Her voice was firm and confident, occasionally slackening to something approaching American. She went on, ‘At the behest of my censorious daughter.’

  ‘Is she censorious?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Most of that generation are. Do you have children?’

  ‘Two. Girl and boy, in that order.’

  ‘And is your daughter censorious?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I’d call her that.’

  ‘Then what would you call her?’

  ‘Self-sufficient, maybe …? Uncommunicative, certainly.’

  ‘Hm.’ She screwed up her eyes. They were, I’d noticed, amber-coloured, flecked with somethin
g darker. Lion’s eyes. ‘I sometimes wish Alexandra would show a bit more self-sufficiency.’

  I was about to respond but Ingrid got in her question first. I saw why I had been told that the encounter would be an interview. ‘Are you married to the father of your children?’

  ‘I was,’ I replied.

  ‘“Was”? Divorced?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Ah. And what did he do before he died?’

  ‘He was a cartoonist.’

  ‘Would I have heard of him?’

  ‘His name’s Oliver Curtis.’ I still had a problem putting his life into the past tense.

  She shook her head. The name meant nothing to her.

  Instinctively, I went to Oliver’s defence. ‘He did the “Major Cock-Ups” strip. And “Teddy Blair”. “Riq and Raq” …?’

  ‘God, yes. I remember those. Very sharp. He understood politics. Really got under the skin of those losers Major and Blair.’ She looked at me with new respect for a moment, then quickly moved on. ‘I married twice. It didn’t take. Either time.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You show remarkable restraint,’ Ingrid observed perceptively, ‘in not asking which of my husbands contributed to Alexandra’s appearance.’

  I didn’t deny that that was what I had been wondering.

  ‘Well, it was neither of the husbands,’ she said, larding the word with contempt, ‘but there’s no secret about it. Are there any secrets at all in these days of Wikipedia?’

  I felt even more guilty for not having looked her up.

  ‘Alexandra,’ she went on, ‘was the result of a brief and ill-advised skirmish with Niall Connor.’

  She said the name as if I ought to know it. And it did sound familiar, though I couldn’t be sure of the context. To do with newspapers perhaps …?

  I was reminded of something Oliver was always saying. Having for some years contributed cartoon strips to the national dailies, he knew a lot about the Press. He liked the buzz of that world, frequently got into long drinking sessions with journalists. But he often told me that, as a profession, they overrated themselves. ‘Think they’re much more important than they are. All tin-pot junior reporters see themselves as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, bringing down governments by their fearless investigations. Changing history – huh. Whereas the average journalist is just an unoriginal hack with a drinking problem.

  ‘And the fuss they make when one of their number dies. Journalists always get a disproportionate amount of obituary space. As if they’re really important. And very few of them are even mildly important. Except to each other.’

  I felt the unblinking focus of Ingrid Richards’ lion eyes on me. ‘Niall Connor the journalist?’ I hazarded, hopefully not about to sound stupid if it turned out to be another Niall Connor.

  ‘Yes. Niall Connor the journalist.’ It was a different kind of contempt she put into that word. Somehow more personal than the way she had disparaged her husbands.

  ‘Niall didn’t believe in marriage,’ she went on. ‘Or perhaps I should say that he didn’t believe in marriage until he got married. To Grace Bellamy, of all people.’

  That was a name I did recognize. She was one of those women who had views on everything and shared them with the public through a regular column in the Daily Mail, along with frequent radio and television appearances. She had also been a regular presence in lifestyle magazines for decades.

  ‘I know who you mean,’ I said. ‘Another journalist.’

  ‘Hardly a journalist,’ Ingrid sneered. ‘A Dial-An-Opinion slot machine, maybe? One of those sickening women who is professionally positive. All the bloody time. Something to say on every subject, gets a column out of everything that comes into her life. Do you know, she actually wrote a book about her own menopause? For God’s sake! As if it’d never happened to anyone else. That’s not journalism, not real journalism. In fact, it’s hard to think of a lower form of literary endeavour.

  ‘Do you know, Grace Bellamy once tried to set up an interview with me? Don’t know how she’d got my contacts, but I suppose you can get anything online these days. She’d done her research – or got someone to do the research for her. She knew where I lived, she knew something of my habits – the Gauloises, the Jameson’s – don’t know how she found all that out, but I suppose plenty’s been written about me in the past, easy enough for a researcher to access.

  ‘Anyway, she rang me, asked if she could write a feature on me for one of the Sunday supplements – can’t remember which one it was. Right wing, anyway, that’s her kind of demographic. I politely thanked her very much but said I didn’t like having my name associated with lightweight tabloid journalism!’ She chuckled with relish at the remembered put-down.

  ‘So,’ she went on, ‘I find it rather sad that Niall ended up married to a woman like that. He was always a bastard, but he used to have some integrity. About his work, anyway. Not about much else. He may not have believed in marriage till he reached middle age, but he certainly believed in infidelity. Which, strangely, is the one subject Grace Bellamy hasn’t written a column about. Yet. Maintaining the front of the everything-in-the-garden’s-lovely marriage, I dare say. Doesn’t want to threaten their domestic bliss.’ More pure venom.

  ‘Some wives, I’m told, can close their minds to their husbands’ infidelities. Which must be a very necessary ability for anyone married to a predatory pouncer like Niall. He was always the same. God, I’ve spent enough times in war zones with him to witness him in action. He’d make a grab at anything with breasts and a pulse.

  ‘Which, all right, may not say much for my taste that I went to bed with him. But he did have an undeniable something, particularly back then. And when you’re stuck out somewhere like Beirut in the 1980s, never knowing whether you’d see the end of the next day … well, a sort of blitz mentality develops. The Commodore Hotel witnessed many unlikelier couplings than me and Niall.

  ‘Still, I dare say age has slowed him down a bit by now. Difficult to recapture the spontaneity of a predatory pouncer when you have to wait an hour for the Viagra to kick in.’

  I was quite surprised by the vitriol Ingrid Richards directed towards her former lover and his wife. From her detached, even sceptical manner, I’d expected her to present a more woman-of-the-world response to romantic disappointments. But Niall Connor had clearly got under skin, as well as under her duvet, and had hurt her deeply.

  I felt the time had arrived when I could say something. ‘When Alexandra talked to me, she gave the impression that her father hadn’t played much of a part in her life.’

  ‘No. The only part he played was impregnating me. And he didn’t know he’d achieved that until a long time after the event. He’d lost interest in me long before he knew Alexandra existed. I don’t think he ever had much interest in her.’

  ‘And was she resentful of that?’

  Ingrid shrugged. ‘I would assume so, but I don’t really know. I never found it easy to find out what Alexandra was thinking.’

  ‘What about now?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Do you find it any easier to know what she’s thinking now she’s an adult?’

  ‘God, no. Harder than ever.’ She turned the lion’s eyes on me with disarming frankness. ‘Look, I really don’t know much about Alexandra. I’ve never spent any length of time with her. It’s only recently that she’s insisted on being in touch on a regular basis. Looking after me – that’s probably the way she sees it. God save me from that! And I suppose her bringing you in to check me out is part of her mistaken mission of mercy.

  ‘Listen, I’ve been a crap mother, no two ways about it. I’m not claiming any brownie points on that score. I never wanted to have a child and, as a result, I’ve probably messed up Alexandra’s life completely.’

  I tried to imagine Fleur ever saying the same about me but couldn’t see it. She was far too well armoured in self-esteem to entertain such thoughts. I don’t think it
ever occurred to Fleur Bonnier that she’d ever done anything wrong, certainly not in her upbringing of me. To her mind, the only blemish in our relationship is that I’m not sufficiently appreciative of my good fortune in having Fleur Bonnier as a mother.

  Ingrid went on, ‘I was stupid. I’d fallen pregnant a couple of times before in my life and had abortions – no problem. With her … well, circumstances meant that that was not an option. And, once I’d taken the pregnancy on board, I started to think … I was in my early forties, last-chance saloon possibly, and the work wasn’t going that well. I had been injured and out of it for a while. So, I wondered whether maybe I should be looking for something else in my life … though God knows why I thought a baby would be the answer. The chances of my having a total personality transplant at that age … well, there’s an old proverb about leopards and spots, isn’t there?

  ‘So, I’m afraid I brought into the world – and shamefully neglected – this poor lump of a girl who has no desire to be distinguished in any way. No ambition. I just can’t get my head around that. She wants the world to be totally unaware she’s even in it. I tell you there’s no parapet so low that Alexandra wouldn’t hide her head behind it.’

  ‘Do you think it’s possible,’ I suggested, ‘that she’s turned out so self-effacing because you have such a high profile?’

  ‘Oh, well done.’ She fixed the eyes on me again. ‘What are you, Ellen – a declutterer or a psychologist?’

  ‘Sometimes have to be a bit of both.’

  She nodded, assessing what I’d said and deciding she approved. Then she sighed. ‘I feel sorry for Alexandra. Sorry that the poor kid ended up with me as a mother. Almost anyone else would have done the job better.’

  This wasn’t said with self-pity. Or self-condemnation. Just acceptance of one of life’s inevitabilities.

  SIX

  ‘And the neglected child,’ Ingrid Richards went on, ‘about whose welfare I never worried nearly enough, is now worried about me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope she didn’t suggest to you that I might be demented?’