His pocket money had been withheld and with it went the prospect of the long-awaited Walnut Whip.
Although it was Lilli’s cat which had been broken, it was his father who had decreed the punishment. Freddie hated him for it. He seethed, lagging behind him, dragging his feet and refusing to answer a single question for the entire duration of the walk. When they crossed the Maida Vale, dodging the traffic, he had visions of his father being run over, or mown down by a red bus. When they walked, in unaccustomed silence, along the towpath, Freddie had vivid notions of pushing the grey-flannel trousers, as hard as he could, into the rubbish-strewn waters of the canal. Four hours later, amongst the daisies, as if by some divine intervention, Freddie’s homicidal wish had been granted. Hugh Lomax, sprawled on the lawn amongst the loose grass clippings in the summer garden, lay dead.
Freddie’s thoughts, so long repressed, were sprung from his unconscious by the demise of Gordon Sitwell.
When he had got back into the car outside Tottenham Court Road station on the way home from the Ball, Freddie had been unable to utter a single word. Taking her eyes from the road to glance at the headlines in the newspaper, Jane had almost run the car into the kerb. ‘Good God!’
Leaning over Freddie’s shoulder, Rosina took the Sunday Times from his lap. ‘“Sir Gordon Sitwell,”’ she read aloud, ‘“chairman of merchant bank Sitwell Hunt International, was found dead in his Rolls Royce in his garage yesterday. Sir Gordon, recently charged with soliciting, was on bail awaiting his trial. Death is thought to be due to carbon monoxide poisoning. According to his wife, Margaret, Sir Gordon has been suffering from depression and he is assumed by the police to have taken his own life…” Daddy!’
Turning round, Freddie had removed the newspaper from her hand. He had no desire to hear any more.
Thirty-three
La Traviata, which Freddie had once seen in Milan with Sidonie, and to which he was listening as he drove up the motorway to Manchester for the signing of the Bowker & Page contract, was not a random choice.
There had been no word from Sidonie since he had left her at the door of Room 333 at the Berkeley. Having placed phone calls which were not returned, left messages which were never answered, he had accepted that Sidonie no longer rated him, and that he was erased for all time from her mental agenda. This morning, whilst getting ready for his final meeting with Harvey Peters and Dennis Bowker, when nothing but the deal, and the fact that he would soon be out of trouble with the bank, was on his mind, he had received a letter from her. After reading it, it was only with the help of an early shot of Black Label (out of sight of Jane) that he had managed to get his act together.
Freddie had recognised the letter immediately. He had always teased Sidonie about her handwriting which would have disgraced a child of ten. He had no need to turn over the envelope with its New York postmark to ascertain the name of the sender. Taking the letter into his dressing-room when he came home from his morning jog, he opened it with the aid of his paper knife.
DEAR FREDDIE,
By the time you read this I will be dead…
Dear Freddie, by the time you read this I will be dead. Dear Freddie, by the time you read this I will be dead. Like an old gramophone record with the needle stuck in the groove, the words revolved in his head. It was some time before he was able to proceed.
DEAR FREDDIE,
By the time you read this I will be dead. You and I always levelled with each other. There is no other way to say it. Not much of an Overture. Not much of an opera. Act One: That last night, at the Berkeley, I told you Fabrizio was dead. That was the moment (I remember I had my fingers in the rice cracker bowl) when I stopped levelling with you. Fabrizio was dead. That much was true. He died from AIDS. He was AC/DC. I knew. I’d always known. He suited my purpose. We had a real fun time. There was never any question of love, on my part, as far as Fabrizio was concerned. You know that.
It was a terrible shock. You can’t pick up a paper these days without reading about AIDS. You don’t think it’s going to knock on your particular door. It was long and slow. Fabrizio was very brave. You don’t get a medal. You get dead. Act Two: You’re right. You’ve read this libretto a hundred times before, Freddie. I had the tests. HIV positive. Give it to me straight, I said, when I went for the results, I can take it. Take it! Jesus Christ, Freddie. I was paralytic. I couldn’t move. Demons had me by the throat. I thought I was going to die right there in the doctor’s office. The truth is. You can take it. FOR OTHER PEOPLE. When it comes to yourself it’s a whole new ball game. I was only a kid, a child, a young woman, had my life in front of me, what had I done to deserve it…all that bullshit. They say you come to terms with your own mortality. With death. You do not, Freddie. You do not. Don’t let anyone give you that crap. You live with it twenty-four hours a day. It’s called a nightmare. When I came to England, when I called you, I was living it. I’d already been hospitalized with PCP (Pneumocystis carinii). I knew I didn’t have very long, but I had to see you. I had to see you, Freddie. When I did it nearly blew my mind. Remember Tristan und Isolde? The tears were not, on this occasion, for Wagner. They were for Sidonie Newmark, deceased. When we got back to the hotel, I wanted so much to take you to bed, to hold you in my arms for the last time. I knew that there could be no question of anything like that as far as you and I are concerned. I only need to hear your voice on the telephone to… It was always like that with us, Freddie. I had to send you away. Act Three: I am back in the hospital. There are purple spots on my skin. I tried to pretend that they were bruises. That I’d banged into something. They go by the name of Kaposi’s sarcoma. I have a pain in my chest. I cough persistently, a hard, dry cough. I have been on a ventilator. I am not going to come out again. That much is sure. I have lost a lot of weight. I am very tired. I am very lonely. And shit scared. People are afraid to visit. I talk with the other guys on the ward but we are all dead men. It is hard to write, but I didn’t want to go without saying goodbye. I will give this letter to my sister and tell her not to mail it until… There’s something I have to tell you. I think I have always known. I kidded myself I was not capable of it. I love you. From that moment I met you on the Concorde. Find a little corner in your heart for me, Freddie, and I will rest in peace.
‘La commedia è finita.’
SIDONIE.
From the damp patch on his T-shirt which had seeped through his chest, Freddie realised that he had been crying. Shit. Shit, shit, shit!
Afraid that he would miss the Manchester train, Jane had come into the dressing-room to see why he hadn’t reappeared. She found him, Sidonie’s letter in his hand, sitting motionless on the chair.
‘Freddie…’
He slipped the letter into his pocket.
‘…what on earth are you up to? You’re going to miss your train.’
Jane was right. Going through the motions of showering and shaving, he had missed it. The next train would have made him late for his meeting. He had had to borrow Jane’s car.
Now he was approaching the Watford Gap as ‘Ah! fors’e lui’, sung by Monsterrat Caballé, heralded the end of the first act of La Traviata. Gordon Sitwell. Sidonie. The landscape of his life was changing. One by one, familiar figures were being painted out.
Gordon Sitwell’s cremation had been private (no flowers), at his own request. His humiliation had superseded his death. A service of thanksgiving for his life and work had been held at St Clement Danes and, out of courtesy to Margaret, Freddie had attended it with Jane. The Rt Hon. The Lord Mayor of London had read from Henry Scott Holland’s ‘Death Is Nothing At All’, and at noon on a Wednesday morning Freddie had found himself standing amidst a crowd of familiar City figures, many of whom averted their eyes in embarrassment at the sight of him, belting out ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ from ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.
As they left the church, he had nodded to Conrad Verger, standing next to his mother-in-law, and shaken hands with a sad
and bewildered Margaret.
‘It was good of you to come, Freddie. Gordon thought so much of you…’
Freddie looked at her, in her black hat, with amazement.
‘He regarded you as a son. He always wanted a son. I don’t know why he…got rid of you. He never did tell me. Gordon never discussed the bank. I think he thought of it as cutting out a canker from a diseased root. Something which had to be done.’
On the way back from St Clement Danes, Freddie had dropped Jane off at Chester Terrace and gone to see Lilli. Something was troubling him. It had been triggered by Gordon Sitwell’s death. He let himself into the flat with his key. Lilli and Mrs Williams were playing whist.
‘You’re home early,’ Lilli said as if Freddie was still at school. ‘Wash your hands and have your tea.’
Making a trick, Lilli laid it on the table.
‘Freddie,’ she said, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘What a lovely surprise. Have you brought…? Have you brought…your wife with you?’
‘Jane,’ Freddie reminded her. ‘No.’
‘My housekeeper will make you a cup of tea. You’d like a cup of tea?’
Freddie needed Mrs Williams out of the room. He wanted to talk to Lilli. When she’d gone into the kitchen, Freddie picked up the photograph of himself playing cricket in the garden with his father.
‘You remember when…’ He was not sure how to refer to his father. He hadn’t called him anything, except in his head, for thirty-four years. ‘When Father died?’
‘Of course I remember. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. She thinks there is. She thinks I don’t remember we had a tin of mango slices. She pretended it was hidden behind the self-raising flour. But do you know,’ Lilli beckoned Freddie to come nearer, ‘she said she was going to post a letter but she slipped out for another one.’
‘That’s enough of that Mrs Lomax.’ Mrs Williams came in with the tea-tray. ‘Mr Lomax has come to have tea with you not to listen to all that nonsense. If you don’t mind,’ she said to Freddie, ‘I’ll slip out for a breath of fresh air while you talk to your mother.’
‘She’s going to meet her boyfriend,’ Lilli said.
Mrs Williams sighed. ‘If you say so.’
When she’d gone, Freddie poured the tea.
‘Three sugars,’ Lilli said politely, as if he did not know.
‘The day that Father died,’ Freddie said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘It was a very long time ago…’ Lilli said. ‘I was due to play at a rehearsal for one of the soloists in Caractacus. I once taught the piano to a nun at a convent. The mother superior insisted on sitting in on the lessons…’
‘We were playing cricket in the garden,’ Freddie said. ‘One minute he was bowling, and the next…’
‘You were always very keen on cricket,’ Lilli said, appearing to concentrate on the circumventions of the spoon. ‘I hear Tristan doesn’t care for it. Your wife told me.’
‘On the death certificate…’ Freddie said, trying to shock her back into remembering. ‘What did it say on father’s death certificate?’
‘Mrs Williams made those cakes. Used a week’s ration of sugar I shouldn’t wonder. Unless she got it on the…’ Lilli’s voice dropped to a whisper ‘…black market.’
By the time Mrs Williams came back, Freddie had got no further. Although his mother had told him about a holiday she had spent on the Isle of Man where she claimed to remember that the news had been brought to them that Blériot had flown the channel, and about the time she had met Jean Simmons on the set at Denham Studios, she had come no nearer to answering Freddie’s question.
He thanked Mrs Williams for the tea – she said it was a pleasure – and as the two well-matched antagonists settled themselves to resume the game of whist, stood up to take his leave.
‘I’ll speak to you in the morning.’ Freddie kissed Lilli. ‘I’ll let myself out.’
‘Such a gentleman,’ Mrs Williams simpered.
Lilli picked up her hand of cards. ‘He had trouble with his valve,’ she said clearly. ‘They didn’t spot it when he joined the army. Rheumatic fever as a child.’
Freddie was by the sitting-room door. ‘Father had a heart condition?’ he said, his own heart pumping.
‘Mitral stenosis. Trumps! And a cerebral embolism.’
Mitral stenosis. And a cerebral embolism. He had not killed him after all. The diagnosis, as supplied by Lilli, was immaterial. Freddie knew better. He had assassinated Hugh Lomax with the same supernatural powers with which he had conveniently disposed of Gordon Sitwell. He must try to control his fantasies in future, and monitor his thoughts.
Sidonie’s death was different. He had not wished her dead. He could not accept that she was dead, that the letter had not been some kind of ghoulish joke. Turning it over in his dressing-room, after he had read it for the umpteenth time, he saw that the address on the back was not, after all, familiar. It was not Sidonie’s. Neither was the name. He had called her sister, Kathie, who lived in Michigan, waking her up.
There was not much more that Kathie could tell him. Sidonie had often spoken about Freddie to her. She felt as if she knew him. She had been with her little sister when she died. Sidonie had become progressively weaker, then slipped away. The battle was predetermined. The letter to Freddie had been written three weeks before the end. There was nothing more to tell.
‘Pray to God,’ Kathie said. ‘Pray for her soul.’
To Freddie’s surprise, he was already approaching Spaghetti Junction, on his way to Manchester, as ‘Parigi, O cara’, the duet between La Traviata’s doomed lovers, came from Violetta’s sickroom. The anguish of the closing trio pierced by the mortal shriek – which was echoed by the orchestra – presaged Violetta’s death. Verdi’s melodrama was a fitting epitaph for the life-loving Sidonie. It would be a long time before he could bring himself to listen to Tristan und Isolde.
‘End of motorway half a mile.’ By the time today was over he hoped to be exiting his own recent motorway of disaster. The breath had been knocked out of him by his dismissal, by the death of Gordon Sitwell, and of Sidonie. The breath but not the fight. Since when has hitting the ball into the net once made you a lousy tennis player? You’re a success, Freddie. It’s how you feel that’s important. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your ship’s got white sails, Freddie. Your ship has always had white sails…
There was a half-empty bottle of Black Label on the seat beside him. Opening the window Freddie hurled it out onto the grass verge. He had been a pain in the arse lately. Especially to Jane. He would make it up to her. Now he would make it up to her. He flexed his shoulders feeling the power which had been taken from him, like that of the shorn Samson, come flooding back.
Silencing La Traviata, with its pale songs and broken hearts, and following the signs to the airport, which led to Hale, he let Cavaradossi’s triumphant ‘Vittoria!’ loose onto the Cheshire air.
Thirty-four
There were already two cars in the carriage drive when Freddie drew up outside the Victorian mansion. Standing on the red-tiled porch, he had hardly touched the bell when an excited Dennis Bowker, wearing an optimistic red shirt beneath a hand-painted tie, opened the front door.
‘Big day, eh?’
‘Big day.’
Crossing his fingers, Freddie followed Dennis Bowker into the dining-room where the Bowker camp, Dennis and Barbara Bowker, their solicitor and accountant, was assembled round the refectory table. They were waiting for Harvey Peters.
‘Whisky?’ At the sideboard, Dennis Bowker held out the bottle of Black Label. He knew Freddie’s tastes.
‘I’ll have some coffee if there is any.’ Dennis Bowker was not to know that this was day one of a new era.
Freddie was on his second cup of coffee, and the solicitor, a prematurely bald 45-year-old, and the accountant, a neat row of pens in his top pocket, had run out of small talk concerning their respective gardens – in particular their dahlias – when Barbara Bowke
r, squinting to look at the jewelled face of her wristwatch, voiced what all of them were thinking.
‘It’s not like Harvey to be late.’
‘There was a fair bit of traffic on the M1…’ Freddie’s worry beads had been out of his pocket for some time. ‘Not to mention the usual roadworks and contraflow systems.’
‘Our roads are a positive disgrace,’ the accountant said.
‘Chap’s got an Aston Martin!’ Dennis Bowker, retirement in Spain within his grasp, bobbed up and down to look out of the window each time he heard a car.
‘Why don’t you give him a bell?’ the solicitor ran a finger round the collar of his shirt.
Dennis Bowker went into the hall, leaving behind him a charged silence broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock the pendulum of which seemed to swing progressively more slowly as the scratch pads on the table became covered with desultory doodles.
‘No reply.’ Dennis Bowker came back into the room. ‘You’re wanted in the kitchen, Barbara. Something about lunch.’
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