by David Nobbs
‘Now after Graham’s death, when I sorted through his papers, I didn’t find anything that could even remotely be described as a con against the whole human race. I wasn’t surprised. As I say, I was doubting his integrity at the time. But supposing there was evidence, and whoever killed him removed the evidence. I believe that Graham had something on somebody, something so serious that he had to be killed. There were only two possible motives for the murder that I could accept, knowing you as I do – misplaced altruism saving me from Graham, or desperate self-preservation.
‘So I began to try to think of possibilities in the lives of all three of you that could be so serious as to necessitate killing Graham with all the risks that entailed. I had difficulty with Timothy. It was difficult to conceive of anything important enough in his life.’
‘Thank you so much.’
‘Do be quiet, Timothy. I’m explaining why you aren’t a murderer. Surely that can’t offend even your touchy personality? I don’t think I ever really believed you capable of murder.’
‘Mum!’
‘I’m sorry if you find the inability to commit a murder an insult, but I’m afraid you’ll have to accept that you’re out of the frame. Now I do believe both Maurice and Nigel capable of murder.’
‘Ma!’
‘Mother!’
‘Oh yes. I was certain Maurice could kill Graham to save me, but I think that presupposed that he knew something about Graham that had never come out, and I didn’t want that to be the case, naturally, since I loved Graham, so I decided to assume, for the moment, that that was not the reason. So, I asked myself, could Graham have enough on Maurice to lead Maurice to need to kill him? We all know he’s had affairs all over the place.’
‘Ma!’
‘But Clare knows it too . . .’
‘Ma!’
‘Of course she does. The knowledge never leaves her eyes.’
‘Oh God, is that true?’
Squeak squeak. Removal of dead Angela. Don’t listen. Talk.
‘Of course it’s true, Maurice. You think more about every poor refugee in Africa and the Balkans than about poor Clare. The plight of gypsies in the Danube Basin keeps you awake but you wouldn’t notice a crack in your bathroom basin. It’s the way you are, but are you a murderer? What could you have done that was so awful that you would need to kill to save your skin? I couldn’t immediately think of anything, so I moved on to Nigel.
‘Now in connection with Nigel I thought long and hard about all sorts of things. I remembered an exchange at my bedside between Nigel and Maurice. Maurice said that he couldn’t get more than ten pages into Timothy’s books.’
‘Oh, Maurice!’
‘Sorry, Timothy. I have tried. I did actually read one right through.’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘but the significant thing was that when you said that you couldn’t finish them, Nigel said, “Oh God, can’t you?” and when you asked him why he was so horrified Nigel said Timothy was his brother and we should all like his books, or something like that. That was pretty limp.’
‘You remember all that?’
‘Yes. I haven’t lost my brain power at all! I’ve been fooling you.’
‘Good God!’
‘Yes. And a possible explanation came to me for Nigel’s horror and his lame explanation of it. The last words of Trouble in Torquay are “Sorry, Ma”. Nigel’s instinctive thought was that if you hadn’t finished the book, Maurice, people might realise that you couldn’t have been the one that typed “Sorry, Ma” to frame Timothy. It was therefore likely that they’d realise that Nigel was the murderer. I always thought him the most likely candidate.’
‘Mother!’
‘Nigel, you can hardly complain about my thinking you a possible murderer since you are an actual murderer.’
Nobody spoke. The silence in the library in Kate’s brain was so intense that Kate felt she could have reached out and touched it.
‘Of course, at first,’ continued Kate at last, ‘I thought that, because Nigel was the most likely, it probably wouldn’t be him, but I was forgetting that this is real life and not a detective story. Now what could Graham have had on Nigel that was so serious that Nigel would need to kill him to save his skin?
‘Well, almost immediately I thought of the thing I waited to hear from Nigel. I waited for years and years and years, and for some reason I didn’t dare to ask you about it, and I suppose eventually I half forgot about it. You made no further mention of the promising progress on a cure for cancer that you were making.’
She paused. Nobody spoke.
‘You’ve gone very silent, Nigel.’
‘You see!’ Timothy sounded quite triumphant. ‘People do go very silent.’
Kate ignored this.
‘I suppose I assumed that you would tell me if you had good news,’ continued Kate. ‘Or maybe my subconscious warned me off the subject. Now we all know that drugs companies make huge profits, but it does seem to me that you are even richer, Nigel, than one might expect, so I wondered, did you take a huge bribe to conceal the progress you had made and abort this particular research, so that a wider range of drugs could continue to be sold, at greater profit?’
‘It’s just a theory, a preposterous theory.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought, but it was the only theory I had, so I thought I’d better put it to the test. And I found that it did explain one or two things that had puzzled me slightly. It explained why you didn’t come to your Uncle Bernard’s funeral. You couldn’t have borne the guilt. It explains why you didn’t tell me at the time about your dinner with Graham in Krogs in Copenhagen, where, I suggest, you had not only the herring platter, the turbot and the rødgrød med fløde, but also the shock of your life. He was on to you. He was going to expose you. There was a row, but it was the other way around.’
You could have heard an aitch drop in the panelled library. Maurice went over to the rows of old books and pretended to read their titles. Nigel strolled to the window and looked out at . . . what?
‘This is all sheer speculation,’ he mumbled without turning round.
‘I know. There’s a lot I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was your own firm or a rival firm that was paying you. I don’t know how you got the name board for Leningrad station or whether it was a fake. I don’t know about the gun or fingerprints or whether you did steal a file on you from Trevor Square. I don’t need to. I’m not bringing you to court, except the court of your conscience. But I know I’m right. Your face told me so when I opened my eyes and looked at you.’
‘You can’t prove any of it.’
‘Of course not. I’m an old woman in a hospital bed. I’m very sorry it was you, Nigel. You were my first-born and very special to me. But I’d have been no less sorry if it had been Timothy or Maurice. It’s an appalling crime against the human race, but why should that be a surprise to me after the times I’ve lived through. I’m deeply shocked and saddened, less by the murder – after all, I’ve long known that one of my sons was a murderer – than by what Graham found out and what led you to murder. How could a man capable of being so greedy and immoral have come out between my legs? To think of all the beautiful things that came out between my legs – Timothy, Maurice, Elizabeth – and all the beautiful things that went in and out between my legs . . .’
‘Mum!’
‘Ma!’
‘Mother!’
‘Sorry, kids, but I can be as outrageous as I like. I’m almost a hundred. I daresay I seem quite a bold person to you, but consider this. For the first forty years of my life I was scared to admit to myself that Dilys was dead and for the last forty I’ve been scared to investigate Graham’s murder. Bit sad, really. Timothy, Maurice, my deepest apologies, my darlings, for ever having suspected you. Off you all go now. Close the library door behind you. I want my brain to myself now. I want peace. It’s over. It’s all over.’
Kate heard their footsteps recede. She heard the secret door in her head close very gently.
She had her head to herself again and felt desolate. She heard more footsteps, and she recognised them. Thin Helen was approaching.
‘Well, well, Kate, and how are you?’ asked thin Helen. ‘A bit better. That’s good. What a day we’ve had. Lily more confused than ever, Delilah back and fore like a piston, and poor Angela Critchley dead. Kate! You’ve been dribbling all down your nice nightshirt! What have you been thinking about?’
22 Charlie
IT WAS GOING to the funeral in Germany that did for her. It was cold in the church and graveyard in Niederlander-ob-der-Kummel, and she went down with bronchitis on the journey home. The illness lasted for several weeks, and it turned her into an old woman at last.
Even now, lying in bed, covered in bed sores, living through what she hoped would be her last night of life, she didn’t regret going.
Elizabeth had driven her there. Elizabeth wanted to see her father buried, even though she had hardly known him.
The little church in the picturesque village with its smiling half-timbered houses was crowded for the funeral of this good and upright man. Afterwards, they met his only son. The Sperm Count’s son was also there, but death had claimed Graf Von Seemen several years before.
Kate smiled as she remembered telling Heinz’s son how difficult she’d found the German language. ‘And you can say that,’ he exclaimed, ‘and you a Welsh lady? I bought a Welsh scrabble set in Llandudno. It had twelve “l”s, ten “y”s, ten “w”s, eight “d”s, and only two “e”s. I am yoking. Do you not remember how my father loved to yoke?’
And it had all flooded over her, memories of Heinz and with them memories of Arturo and Walter and Graham and Norman and Gwyn, whose beauty she could sometimes scarcely remember. There, in that rather austere house on the edge of the tumbling village she briefly gave way to all the weaknesses she claimed to have conquered – self-pity, a sense of loss, nostalgia almost unbearable in its intensity. And now, at two in the morning, in a long hospital night, she felt . . . oh Lord . . . she felt all those human emotions all over again, for the middle of the night is the weakest time for the strongest of us, and Kate was very weak now even at the strongest times.
It was Maurice who took her to the retirement home. The Golden Glade Retirement Home. Big, early Victorian house. Slightly gloomy. Large garden with fine roses, wonderful in summer, horribly bare in winter, all sodden earth and thorns. She surprised him by showing a touch of worldly pride as she introduced him to the other residents with the words, ‘This is my son Maurice, whom you may have seen on television, and this is his fiancée Clare.’
They led her along the corridor to a room which seemed desperately small and bare to Maurice and Clare. The radiator was flaking, and the commode was badly scratched.
‘Well well,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s funny to think that six weeks ago I was driving down the Rhine with Elizabeth. From Zimmer frei to zimmer frame in thirty-six days. Look, I shall get the evening sun. I’ve asked for a little rack for my wines. I shall be happy here.’
She had outlived all her generation. Daphne Stoneyhurst, Jenny Carter, Olga Begelman, Stanley Wainwright, all gone now. It’s what happens if you’re lucky enough to live for a very long time. No point in getting upset about it.
None of the family, to do them justice, had wanted her to go into a home.
Timothy had said, ‘I’d have you, but you’d not like living in Majorca, so far away from your friends.’
What friends? They’re dead. She had thought it, but hadn’t said it. He was right, anyway. She wouldn’t have liked living in Majorca.
‘And things are a bit frail between me and Paula at present,’ he’d said, ‘but surely one of the others would have you?’
Maurice had said, ‘I just can’t have you, Ma. I’m away for weeks on end. Clare would get the . . . well, not the burden exactly. But it wouldn’t be fair on her.’
What a time to be thoughtful about Clare at last, she had thought, but she hadn’t said anything. Best not.
Nigel had said, ‘You said yourself I’m never there. I’m never anywhere long enough. I hate it, but that’s my life. I always seem to be opening up unused houses.’
Poor you, Kate had thought. What miseries those of us with only one home are spared. But she hadn’t said anything. No point.
Elizabeth had said, ‘I’d have you like a shot, but it’s Terence. He’s a creature of habit. And there’s his mother. If you, why not her? And you two’d never get on. She drops her aitches.’
Kate was ninety-five when she entered the home. She was walking quite slowly now, with the aid of a stick. Her balance was bad, and her eyesight wasn’t too good any more. Only her superb hearing remained unimpaired. A casual observer might have expected that her relationships with men might be over. Maurice certainly thought so.
We know her rather better, you and I, don’t we?
She saw Charlie the moment she entered the residents’ lounge on the first evening. She dreaded entering the room, with its rows of huge, droopy armchairs which dwarfed the bony old people who were sitting in them. Kate Copson, she told herself, what you have lived through and still you find it an ordeal to enter this room! So she shrugged, told herself, ‘Come on, woman. This is your life now,’ and entered, and there he was, at the far end of the room, under the huge salmon in a glass case which was all that remained from Colonel Pride-Aitcheson’s days. He was a short, slim, weather-beaten old man with skin like an old bag. She sensed a twinkle in his eyes as he sized her up. She held his gaze for a moment and then sat, discreetly, near the round table covered in magazines almost as old as the residents.
It had only been a brief look, but a woman two chairs away, whom Kate would later discover to be called Martha Kitchen, said, in her know-all’s voice, just loud enough to be heard, ‘Aye, aye, here’s competition. Betty Beveridge had better look to her laurels.’
It didn’t take Charlie long to start chatting Kate up, and she offered him no discouragement. Why should she? The other women resented her, and not only Betty Beveridge. What had she got that they hadn’t? A real interest in Charlie, that’s what. A response to the twinkle in his eyes. An interest in the pain behind the twinkle. Such pain there.
Marjorie Ellingham was quite friendly, despite Charlie, and Isobel Hutton wasn’t too bad, but the rest of them!
Charlie had known one of them since he was a child. Margaret Duckworthy. ‘Look at her now,’ he said. ‘Look at that sad, ugly, apathetic, mean-spirited, stupid old hag. It’s hard to believe that seventy years ago she was a sad, ugly, apathetic, mean-spirited, stupid young schoolgirl.’ He twinkled. Behind the twinkle, such pain. He’d made his money out of scrap. He was shrewd. He tried to teach Kate chess. She resisted at first, the old puritanism. In the end she gave in, and enjoyed it. At first Charlie beat her easily. By the end she beat him more often than he beat her, but it was never easy.
All the children visited her regularly, and she went to stay with Nigel, Maurice and Elizabeth for a week every year, though she stopped going to Majorca in 1997, when she found the flight too difficult.
On her ninety-sixth birthday, in October 1995, they all came to see her, and took her out to lunch to a place round the corner, a pub with a restaurant, called the Speckled Hen. It wasn’t bad, and there weren’t any steps. Nigel had the fish cakes with light Thai dressing and the calves’ liver on a bed of rocket. Even Potters Bar was trendy now.
They raised their glasses to her, and wished her a happy birthday, and drank to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Do you know that in Korea there is no word for old people’s home? The concept just isn’t known.’
They looked at her in horror.
‘Did you know,’ she continued, ‘that in Sri Lanka the very young, the young, the middle-aged, the old and the very old all live and eat and talk and laugh together?’
None of her three sons knew what to say. Elizabeth, to do her credit, rallied first, but then she was a woman.
‘But we thought yo
u were happy here,’ she said.
Kate smiled. ‘I don’t want to live with any of you,’ she said. ‘This isn’t Korea. This isn’t Sri Lanka. This is Britain in the 1990s. I’ve had a lot of guilt in my life. Now I’m free of guilt, and you are the guilty ones. It’s your turn. Thank you.’
She could see them wondering if she was developing a nasty streak, if she was beginning to go funny. Well, she felt that she had earned the right to have a little sport at their expense.
‘I wouldn’t have come to any of you if you’d offered,’ she said. ‘And you’d all have felt so generous and virtuous. It’s a shame for you that you didn’t invite me. I’ll tell you what. After you’ve dropped me off, this afternoon, have a conference, come back, say you’ve decided you’ll all have me for three months of the year. The rotation of the corpse. I’m practically a corpse now.’
‘Mum, this is terrible,’ said Timothy.
‘Sorry. Aren’t I allowed to be just a little bit mischievous? And it’s all right. If you did that I still wouldn’t come. I am happy, in my way. I have the sun in the evening. I have two glasses of wine every evening, and a third if the sun’s shining, to celebrate my good fortune. And I have Charlie. I couldn’t leave Charlie.’
‘Mother!’ said Nigel.
‘I might marry him.’
‘But he was in scrap!’
‘Elizabeth! That is so snobbish. I will marry him, I think.’
She didn’t marry Charlie, though, and for a very good reason. He didn’t ask her.
On Charlie’s hundredth birthday, there were flags and a banner stating ‘100 not out’. There was a tele-message from the Queen. There was cake and jelly and they all sang ‘Happy birthday to you’ and ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’.
‘I find all this very tasteless and schmaltzy,’ said Betty Beveridge. ‘I hope they don’t do it for me.’
‘They won’t, don’t you worry,’ said Caroline Upshott.
‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Martha Kitchen, the know-all. ‘You wait.’
Kate was keeping a low profile and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t her day. It was his.
