Vintage Crime

by Martin Edwards

  In the course of that first year, he came to my home and met my family. I went to his. During term-time, we did everything together. Went out with girls (often the same ones, though consecutively rather than simultaneously), drank, worked, walked, talked. About the only activity we didn’t share was screwing. No, we didn’t do that but we certainly talked about it afterwards. Extensively. Compared notes. Awarded points.

  That went on for nearly two years. Until the second Long Vacation, in fact. Then he got a summer job with one of those market research companies, and I was taken on for six weeks as a general dogsbody by one of the national dailies. Old boy network, not merit. My father knew somebody who knew somebody. It still worked like that, back then. We wanted to find a place to share, Gerry and I, but our funds didn’t run to that. But at least we were both in London, so we were able to meet up most days.

  It was in July that I met Anna. July 29th, to be exact.

  ii. Gerard:

  “I don’t want to move again,” Susanna said.

  “We have to,” I said.

  “I just can’t face it, Gerry. Not again.”

  “I can’t write,” I said. “I haven’t written a decent word since he tracked us down.”

  “This is absolutely the best house yet,” she said. She squared her shoulders and stuck out her jaw and as usual, I experienced a surge of desire. We were sitting in bed reading the Sunday papers and the shoulder-squaring bit made her small breasts more prominent. Her nipples pushed against the dove grey satin of the nightdress she wore and made me want to fling aside the coloured supplements and the book review pages and yet again, as so many times over the years, make love to her.

  Usually she was as eager as I was, but I knew that this morning it would be wiser to forego the pleasures of the flesh, however mutual they might be. The men from the estate agent had arrived yesterday afternoon to erect the For Sale board outside our house and Susanna had been restive ever since.

  “The best house,” she repeated. “Gerry, I’m happy here. Truly happy. I really don’t want to move.”

  “Even with that maniac living down the lane?”

  “Even with him.”

  “You know why he does it, don’t you?”

  “I know what you’ve told me.”

  “He thinks I was having an affair with his bloody wife.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “You know I wasn’t. I didn’t even like her that much, let alone want to jump into bed with her. But will he believe that? Will he hell.”

  “Can’t you just ignore him?”

  “Of course I can’t. It’s absolutely impossible. And while he’s around, I can’t write. Which means, my precious sweetheart, that I can’t earn a living.”

  “Can’t you bribe him to go away?”

  “I tried that once. He just laughed in my face. The trouble is, he earns a fair old whack himself. Or used to, before he started drinking so much. And when his parents died, they left him quite a bit, too.”

  “Seven moves in ten years. I had enough of that with Daddy.” Susanna’s father had been a military man.

  “I know, darling, but what else can we do?”

  “The garden,” wailed Susanna. “And the friends I’ve made. The people here are so warm and friendly.” Tears started to fall down her cheeks. “Maria,” she snuffled. “I haven’t had a friend as close as Maria is since I left school.”

  “Darling…” I took her little hand in mind. “I promise you we’ll find another house, just as nice as this. And other friends.”

  “How?” she demanded. She knuckled her eyes, looking as if she were about eight years old, instead of thirty more than that. “Wherever we go, he’ll find us. He always has before. Every time I start to settle in, we’re off again.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “We could change our names, for a start.”

  “But you can’t begin from scratch, Gerry. People wait for the new Gerard O’Connell the way they wait for the new Robert Ludlum or – or Danielle Steel.” Even in her distress, my wife wasn’t going to place me up there with the literary greats, with the Amises or the Rushdies. I didn’t care. Her assessment of my talent just about matched my own and that wasn’t particularly high. I made a hell of a lot of money and frankly, I wasn’t too bothered about what the critics thought. You could say that I’d sold out, or you could say that I had moved on from my early unattainable goals, had come to terms with what I was, that I was an honest, even a happy, man, in that I made the very best use of what gifts I had.

  Of course, in our university days, I had higher aspirations. Literature, no less. I was going to write the Great British Novel, the Great Global Novel. I was going to take the world by storm. And not just once, but many times as the years went by and I matured into Grand Old Manhood, as I drew round my more-than-worthy shoulders the mantle of literary genius.

  Of course it didn’t work out like that. I spent a year on the Great Novel, only to discover that in me, the seam of literary gold ran thin indeed. I mined it assiduously, buffed and polished it, spun it into fantastical filigree. Metaphor and allegory were my tools, myth and dream the scaffolding on which I erected my plot. Flimsy, you’ll agree. Insubstantial. Far too slight to carry the burden of my pretensions. Nobody, in short, would touch it.

  I found myself a series of part-time, dead-end jobs, the sort of thing which kept body and soul together but little more. In my spare time, I wrote another novel, and another. The publishers remained distinctly unenthusiastic and I grew more and more depressed. We’d have starved if Susanna hadn’t found a job as a PA to some high-powered executive in the oil business.

  Then one cold winter, just before Christmas, my darling wife came home from work and said she’d been given a bonus. Why didn’t we, she asked, splash out, spoil ourselves? Forget the bills, and blue it all on a package holiday to somewhere warm? So that’s what we decided to do. Of course, after the first euphoria, common-sense prevailed. Package holidays cost an arm and a leg and we only had a small bonus to spend. We listed everyone we knew who lived abroad and might be prepared to let us foist ourselves upon them for a fortnight, and finally came up with South Africa, where Susanna had cousins she hadn’t seen for years. That’s where we went.

  The cousins – a couple from Surrey with two young children – farmed acres of dusty red soil under wide blue skies. They lived among people whose skins were the colour of aubergines and whose expectations dared not rise above the next meal for their children. They lived inside a heavily walled and guarded compound, with a couple of fierce dogs prowling the perimeters of the grounds. There were cars, horses, tennis courts. There was a blue swimming pool and gardens kept green by constant watering. Conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous indifference.

  While we were there, unrest bloomed in the cities. News came of bombs thrown, of troubles in Soweto, of houses burned and young men shot. It disturbed Susanna and me. The cousins said they had learned to live with it and we didn’t like to ask at what price.

  One afternoon, Susanna and I travelled by jeep to visit friends of friends of Susanna’s parents. The house we visited was very similar to the one where the cousins lived and I thought then how strange it was that people could exist without worry in a situation of such contrast, such polarisation. We stayed the night, enjoying a barbecue out on the wide patio beneath stars far more significant than those we knew at home, served by silent young men with blank faces and expressive eyes.

  The next day we drove back to the cousins’ house. We would be leaving in two days’ time. We agreed that we had enjoyed this glimpse of an alien way of life but we would not be sorry to return to our own much humbler existence.

  Susanna said: “Do you suppose it was like this in India, during the Raj?”

  “No,” I said. “In India, the two separate cultures existed side by side. There was a lot of unfairness
about the British rule, I’m sure, but they did at least attempt to be benevolent. There was none of this deliberate repression, this denial of the rights of others.”

  “I hate it,” Susanna said, with a shiver. “There’s something sinister about it. I’ll never come back. At least, not while things are the way they are.”

  But while I never came to terms with South Africa – as it used to be under apartheid, I mean – I can’t feel truly negative about the place. If I sound utterly callous about this, I certainly don’t mean to, but it was entirely thanks to our visit that our fortunes changed.

  Thanks to the visit, and, of course, to old Marty. I might still be working at some boring job during the day and trying, in my spare time, to fashion the crystalline prose of which I knew I was capable into something that a publisher would want to print, if he hadn’t invited me to his birthday party.

  But he did. And it was there that I met a young woman who was a commissioning editor with some publishing house. It was there that, in fact, I met his Anna.

  iii. Martin:

  July 29th.

  The day I fell in love for the first – and it appears, the last – time. Totally, irrevocably, head over heels. All that crap. Anna was the light of my life, the icing on my cake, the song in my heart, the fairy on my Christmas tree. All that crap. I’d have crossed Saharas to see her, swum Hellesponts to reach her. I sighed for her. I’d have died for her. I loved her. The miracle of it was, that she loved me back.

  She was a year older than I was. Just finished a degree at Bristol. Filling in time before taking up the job she’d got in one of the major publishing houses. Nothing grand. Secretarial work. But it would lead on to better things, she said. It always does, she said. Publishing is dominated by women. I’m going to be one of them, she said.

  And, in due course, she was.

  When we went back for our final year, Gerry and I, things had altered between us. He’d met Susanna somewhere during the summer and was much occupied with her. I’d got Anna. He told me all about Susanna. I told him little or nothing about Anna. At that stage, she was too precious to be shared, even with Gerry. Susanna visited him often, but I always went back to London to see Anna. She was preoccupied with her job, with learning the ropes, with working out how to get ahead. I was content just to be in her orbit. She had little time to spare and I was grateful when she spared it with me.

  By the end of the summer term, Gerry and Susanna were engaged. As a wedding present, his parents bought them a flat in St. John’s Wood. An aunt or something gave him a large sum of money, and he told me he was going to take a year off to write his novel. I was happy for him. I thought that some day soon I’d introduce Anna to the two of them.

  Somehow, I never did. There wasn’t time. I got a job on my local newspaper. I’d stopped worrying about being a novelist. Pragmatic, that’s me. I just didn’t have what it takes. Dedication. Doggedness. Self-confidence. I realised I wasn’t a marathon man. More of a fifty yard sprint man. The short rather than the long haul. Journalism suited me. I had plenty of the rat-like cunning that is a prerequisite of the job. I moved on. Up to Manchester, then down again to London. A stint on the foreign desk in Japan, another in Germany. Back to London.

  I got lucky. Wrote a piece or two which caught the attention of those who matter. Wrote theatre reviews for a prestigious magazine, then edited the book-pages of a Sunday. Got asked to do the restaurant critiques. Became a columnist on one of the dailies. Appeared regularly on a bookish game show on Radio 4. Became, eventually, famous. Not for very much, I admit. Except drinking. Got kicked out of the Groucho once. Picked a fight with Peter Ackroyd. Made acerbic comments on TV about the finalists for the Booker Prize. Threw up at some literary award luncheon. The enfant terrible of the chattering classes.

  Anna and I set up together. Bought a house in Hampstead. The place smelled of dry rot and mice, but I didn’t care, as long as she was there with me. And she was. She loved me. In bed, or out of it. Adored me. As I adored her. Looking back, I can see that it’s not good. A love like that spoils you for anyone else. She was my hostage to fortune.

  We gave a party. A celebration. Anna’s birthday. A book she’d commissioned had reached the Top Ten in the Sunday Times Bestseller List. My own collection of pieces was doing well on the non-fiction lists. I invited Gerry and Susanna, who were recently back from a trip to South Africa. He still hadn’t managed to get published. Anna had looked at his books but said that though they had good bits in them, the whole was distinctly less than the sum of the parts. That he was a gnat straining at a fly. Something like that. I can’t remember exactly how she put it but it summed poor Gerry up.

  I noticed them at the party, talking together in a corner, Gerry and Anna. They were still there, looking serious, half an hour later. When they’d gone, when we were in bed, Anna said: “I think we could have a bestseller on our hands.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Believe it or not, your mate. Your chum. Gerard O’Connell.”

  “Gerry? A bestseller? He’s been trying for years to get published. Can’t even get on to the slush pile.”

  “He just might,” Anna said, “turn out to be the new Wilbur Smith.”

  “What’s wrong with the old one?”

  She fitted herself against me, her long limbs cool. “He’ll need editing, of course. He’s got literary pretensions, but we’ll soon sort him out.”

  And she was right. The first Gerard O’Connell, assisted by judicious and plentiful publicity, got into the Bestseller list. So did the second, and the third. And all the ones after that.

  At first I didn’t mind the time he spent with Anna. Just part of the job. They went down each year to the cottage in Wales which Gerry bought with the proceeds from the fourth or fifth book. Editing. Ten days, two weeks. It didn’t occur to me that anything was going on. I mean, he had Susanna. She was devoted. He was uxorious. The happy couple. Call me naïve, but it never bloody well crossed my mind.

  iv. Gerard:

  I told her, this Anna, whom Martin had not introduced to us before, what had happened. How we’d come back to find the gate of the compound hanging open. How we’d realised there was something wrong when the dogs didn’t come running from the house at the sound of our car. How we pushed open the front door and seen – well, I’d seen. I’d managed to push Susanna away before she could step inside the house, ordered her to stay in the car. The shock…just telling Anna about it brought everything back, all the horror of it. Limbs. Severed limbs. A child’s head. Three fingers lying on a table. A tongue. Blood everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I found bits of them scattered all through the house. Just bits. The girls, Susanna’s cousin and her little girl, had been raped in the grossest kind of way and then hacked to pieces. The other two, the boy and his father, had been treated even worse. All I could think of was that if we’d been there, Susanna and I would have suffered the same fate.

  I wouldn’t let her into the house. We got away as fast as we could, to the police station, to the consulate. Susanna drove. I was incapable of holding the wheel. Shivering and weeping, and occasionally getting her to stop while I spewed up my guts at the side of the road. Oh, God. It was impossible to describe the horror of that house.

  Until, that is, Anna persuaded me to write it down, to turn it into a story. She said that at worst, it would be therapy for me, at best, it might even be a publishable book.

  She was right. By the time I’d finished writing it, I was already thinking of a plot for the second book. There was an incident in my childhood, on a visit to an uncle in New Zealand… The books went on from there. The new Gerard O’Connell became as much a fixture in the publishing calendar as the annual Dick Francis. Anna helped me. I freely admit that I wouldn’t have got off the ground if it hadn’t been for her. It was a strictly professional relationship, whatever Martin chose to believe. I’m not attracted by those big women wit
h long legs and manes of sweeping black hair. They frighten me, actually. I’m always afraid that one day they’ll open their wide gashes of mouths and swallow me whole. Susanna is a little thing who needs my protection and therefore makes me feel like a man. She doesn’t ask for independence, or even equality. She is as happy to let me take the decisions for us both as I am to make them.

  Anyway…it became a regular routine. I’d write the new book in first draft. Go through and produce a second draft, send it off to Anna for consideration then hole up with the computer in our Welsh cottage to come up with a third draft. After which, Anna would join me down in Wales and we’d go through the book again, line by line, until it was as good as I – as we – could make it.

  We were rich, Susanna and I. I loved all the trappings that went with the money, all the fame and adulation, the invitations, the appearances on TV, the requests for my opinion on almost any subject under the sun. I never heaved a sigh for the great literary novels I might have written. I had found my proper level and I rejoiced in it. I felt no need to justify myself, not in any way.

  One year, the book was to be about a man living quietly in the house where he was born, which had been handed down through the generations. A few hundred acres, country pursuits, sense of duty, wife and kids, no surprises. And then, pow! into his life comes a dangerous stranger, demanding, insisting, threatening everything that our hero holds dear. If he is to regain his peace of mind, he has no choice but to deal with the matter. Gun running came into it. Brazilian gold. Beautiful temptresses. Even drugs, though I try to keep off the subject since market research has shown that my readers don’t want to know about them except in the most general and sanitised form. Gun running…