by A. N. Wilson
On the way home that night in the tube, he continued to listen on his headset to tapes of a posh actor reading aloud from P. G. Wodehouse. But gradually, as the train moved further from the centre of things, Piet faded.
At Green Park he changed. Trains. Tapes. Character. He was gyrating now to heavy metal. It was turned up so fucking loud that he felt his ear-drums, like, explode. A real arse-face next to him, reading a Financial Times, glared. The noise from those ‘phones, their insistent tss-tut-ter-tss-tut-ter-tsss, was getting up his foreskin, the shit-mouth. Tuli smiled.
Can Lennox Mark survive the Western African crisis?
The article on which the City shit was trying to concentrate hinted that the Tub of Lard was about to be flushed down the toilet. Share prices in News Incorporated rock bottom. Copper mines – bang, bang. No one buying the Legion. Father Chell winning the fight.
‘I say,’ said Slicker, ‘that’s awfully loud.’
He pointed, with exaggerated stage gestures, to the pulsating, throbbing ’phones.
‘Could you turn it down a little?’
Tss-ter-tar, tss-tss.
Tuli’s rhythmic sway turned into a near dance, and he smiled. He’d begun to think of ways he’d finish with Fat Guts. A glutton’s murder should be appropriate. Make him eat. There was that electric carving knife in the kitchen. Maybe get the Big Man down the kitchen, and tie him in the chair. Helene could help. Gently rubbing her groin, getting off on her own fingers, she could stand by, waiting at the wall socket to switch on the electricity. Switch on now, Pussy-Helene! Whirr-whirr-rrrrr! Open wide, Big Boy. Taste blade. Tongue off. That ain’t no ketchup, man, splatting through the atmosphere. And all the angels of God will sing, Daddi-o, as you tell me what this tastes of, then in, in, in.
PART TWO
ONE
In a black suit, black tie, crispest of white shirts, Sinclo Manners sat in a second-class compartment, rattling westward. He’d noticed a lot of people, mainly in their twenties and thirties, similarly clad, climbing aboard the train at Paddington. It was clearly going to be a large funeral. Kitty Chell’s death at twenty-nine had been splashed all over the papers for several days.
Sinclo himself only learnt of his cousin’s death when he came upon the oafs on the back bench at the Legion holding up a photograph of her corpse.
Worledge, with the thuggish henchmen he had brought with him from the Sunday newspaper he’d edited previously, was, as usual at that hour of the afternoon, pondering between a choice of clichés.
‘It’s gotta be POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL,’ said one of the thugs.
‘I want more meat in the headline,’ said Worledge’s gravelly tones as he lit up his cheroot. ‘I want the drugs, I want Daddy’s title.’
‘He’s an old nutter and all, Lord Longmore.’
‘GILDED YOUTH? WHAT A WASTE? I mean here’s a girl who was an aristocrat’s daughter, a good-time girl, she was bright, intelligent, she’d been to Cambridge.’
‘Great story, great story,’ growled Worledge. ‘Pity she was alone when she topped herself. Are we absolutely sure of that?’
‘So-SHE HAD IT ALL.’
‘Had THEM all, more like.’ Lewd laughter.
Sinclo felt anger course through his veins quite uncontrollably, and with a shaking voice he advanced on the editor.
‘What’s happened? How did she die?’
‘Oh, we might have guessed you’d know Lady Kitty Chell.’ Worledge’s sneer was now habitual when talking to Sinclo. He exuded class-envy and resentment.
‘Choked on her own vomit,’ said one of the thugs.
‘Better than choking on someone else’s,’ quipped another wag.
‘How dare you?’ Sinclo erupted. ‘How dare you laugh at the death of …’
Seeing Kitty’s photograph in the pudgy mitt of this oaf was too much. He reached to grab it, thereby creating a moment of school-style scuffle.
‘Temper!’
‘Just cool it,’ said Worledge, evidently furious. Even though the oaf was as much to blame as Sinclo, it was to Manners that Worledge said, ‘You’ve got to keep a watch on that temper of yours. And that’s a warning.’
Worledge had been using this phrase with ominous frequency round the office in the three months since he’d become editor.
The thugs assumed, when Sinclo lost his temper, that he had at some stage been Kitty’s lover. This was to be expected. What really shocked him, when he tried to get a grip on himself, was to discover how the story had arrived at the back bench of the Legion so quickly. Worledge knew of Kitty’s death before her own father. The policeman who had discovered her body had immediately tipped off his usual contact on the Legion, the seediest of the stringers who helped the crime desk with all the murkiest stories of prostitutes, and many of the most ghoulish autopsies. A sum had been discussed. Money – cash – had changed hands. And all this before the corpse had been removed for autopsy. Sinclo had heard that this was standard practice, but to see evidence of it in the pudgy hands of Worledge’s henchman – to see Kitty’s pale, shocked, beautiful face, so very scared and so very dead, stuck between the henchman’s thumb and forefinger was an outrage.
Sinclo’s eyes had met Worledge’s and in that moment the two men knew mutual loathing.
Some time that afternoon, Worledge called Sinclo into his office.
‘I want you to do the funeral.’
Worledge had a way of smiling which consisted of simply opening his mouth and baring a row of even, orange teeth. There was no warmth in the eyes which glinted behind horn-rimmed spectacles. He watched to see what Sinclo would do. Sinclo was in a state of grief and shock. This would have been the moment to leave a job which he hated and a newspaper which he despised. In some deep place in his heart, he had already taken leave. The moment by the back bench had been a definitive one. He was no longer afraid, either of Worledge’s bullying, or of the poverty and insecurity which would result if he was sacked. He was, however, punch-drunk, actually breathless with shock at what he had seen on the back bench. He was therefore only half aware of what Worledge was saying to him.
‘I … er …’
‘The Kitty Chell funeral. ARISTOCRATIC HEROIN – what do you think? HEROIN without an E …’
‘I … of course I’m going … I’m …’
‘We’ll want all the stories … Who’s there … the ex-lovers …’ He named several actors, pop stars, aristocratic playboys, some of whom had known Kitty, some of whom (Sinclo was fairly sure) she’d never so much as met.
Sinclo had not managed to say the right words to Worledge. He had not been able to say, ‘Kitty was my beloved cousin. Of course I shall be attending her funeral. If you think I shall use that as an opportunity for collecting stories about her, then I am leaving, on the spot, now.’ But he’d merely stammered at Worledge, who had sneered back, ‘Call yourself a fucking journalist?’
Even by Worledge’s standards, the paper the next day had been a masterpiece of bad taste and inaccuracy.
Kitty was variously described as Kitty, Lady Kitty and Lady Chell. Of course, who gives a toss about these things nowadays, but if you are going to use someone’s title, why get it wrong? She was described as having been to Cambridge, which was untrue, as being the only daughter of the ‘eccentric’ Earl of Longmore, eighty-three – in fact Monty Longmore was seventy-three. (She also had two sisters, Marina, who was a nurse in West Africa, and Lizzie, who worked in publishing.) The paper named the actress with whom Monty had an affair a quarter of a century before. Much more damaging than these trivial details, it claimed that Kitty had been a heroin addict since schooldays, had been a criminal to feed her habit even though she was given a huge allowance by the eccentric earl, and that she had committed suicide. Yes, Kitty was what Worledge would have called a poor little rich girl.
It was true that she had received treatment for drug abuse. Since her marriage, Sinclo had not seen much of her, but he was fairly sure that she was clean. Rumours drifted about the family t
hat she had developed various fads, and that she suffered from some eating disorder. Her husband, Charles Henderson, was said to be ‘marvellous’. Her death, as an inquest established beyond doubt the day before the funeral, was caused by a rare complication of an ectopic pregnancy. No one could be certain, but it was very probably not related to drugs, or a wild life in her early twenties. It was a piece of quite horrible bad luck. None of the newspapers issued so much as one word of retraction or apology, either for printing the ‘great picture’ of her dead body, or for the repeated allegations that she had died of an overdose or in the midst of some self-destructive debauchery.
Sitting in the train, watching drizzly Berkshire turn to rain-soaked Wiltshire, Sinclo remembered childhood scenes of Kitty – cantering on Gumdrop, a little black pony which won several rosettes at gymkhanas; or writhing with mirth on the frayed old carpet at Throxton as Lizzie tickled her; or sitting in the Orangery, he the young subaltern about to be posted to Zinariya, and she just starting at Wycombe Abbey. She’d told him about the First World War poets she was studying with the English mistress, and he had wondered whether he was in love with his schoolgirl cousin.
Her wan, elfin, adolescent features were now overshadowed in memory by the horrible photograph of her face in death. Sinclo had been programmed by nature to feel tenderness about a particular physiognomy, and it was only as he meditated upon Kitty’s face, and for the first time recognized its broad similarity to the woman with whom he was in love, that he looked up and saw Rachel Pearl.
‘Do you mind if I …’
TWO
‘I thought you’d be travelling First.’
‘Er … I … er …’
In fact, the decision to travel Second inwardly assured Sinclo that he was going to the funeral in a purely private capacity, rather than claiming the cost of a first-class ticket on expenses.
‘I’m … not …’
‘It’s hell, isn’t it?’ she said firmly.
She had very red lips. Her face was pale as alabaster, her undyed hair as black as her neatly buttoned coat, her leather gloves.
Rachel did not know that she had been seen in the wine bar embracing L. P. Watson. She did not know what effect this had had on Sinclo, because although being generally aware that he was ‘nuts’ about her, this was an emotional fact which she did not take especially seriously. It was certainly low on her list of priorities at the moment, when her relationship with L.P., and its ending, her career, and its future were all churned up with overpowering grief and shock at the death of her friend. When she had spotted Sinclo climbing on the train at Paddington station, she had not thought, ‘There is a man who is in love with me.’ Still less had she thought, ‘There is a man whose heart was broken last week by the sight of me kissing L.P. in Bin Ends.’ She thought, ‘There is a man who is the closest thing to a friend in my office, who also knew Kitty.’ She had made for him as for a kindred spirit.
Rachel, for all the confusions of her emotional life, was morally a straightforward individual. This had sometimes made her frightening to her friends: it certainly (she knew this and bitterly rued it) was one of the factors in her estrangement from Kitty over the years.
At the University, Kitty and Rachel had been tutorial partners, which meant that almost every week they met in their tutor’s rooms and one or other of them read out an essay. In the first couple of weeks, Rachel had bridled at the partnership. She had even complained to her tutor, and asked if it would be possible to be taught on her own. She was told that they would, sometimes, be taken for one-to-one tutorials, but that for her first term, she was to do French literature with Kitty.
Kitty gushed. She treated Oxford, tutorials, life itself as if it were a party.
‘You’re so kind!’ – if one lent her a pencil with which to take notes.
‘Poor thing – can’t bear it!’ – her interjection, during Rachel’s first reading of an essay, on the plight of Racine’s Andromaque.
Strangely enough, the two young women had not been dissimilar in appearance. Both had dark hair worn in those days of their late teens and earliest twenties cut very short. Both were beauties, and knew it. Kitty had bright blue eyes which bewitched her admirers. Rachel’s eyes were dark. When they both wore black jumpers and trousers, they could be mistaken if not for sisters then for a pair of some kind. Nothing could have been more different, though, than their approaches to relationships, Oxford, work, life. Rachel was passionately interested in her work, and saw no need to pretend otherwise. She wanted to get a First, not as the means to a good job, but to prove to herself that she was as clever as she supposed, and because, given the possibility of getting a degree of any kind, it seemed unthinkable to want anything less than the best. Kitty seemed to have no interest in success of this kind, and wanted, mysteriously, to present herself to the world, and in particular to Rachel, as an airhead with no intellectual convictions or capabilities. In fact, she spoke excellent French, and her German was not bad either. When she stopped gushing and claiming that Hippolyte, as it were, was ‘perfectly sweet’, she in fact made intelligent comments on almost all the books they read together – though her essays were seldom finished, and did not match the vigour of her talk.
Rachel’s Oxford was work, and the Union, where she helped organize debates, and a circle of friends, and two love affairs, one of a schoolboy-schoolgirl kind in her first year with a nice boy she had met at a lecture, the other more serious, though broken to bits when the boy discovered she was seeing someone else – a much older man – in London. She had concentrated primarily on her work, and she had been rewarded with a First.
Kitty’s Oxford was parties, parties, parties from the first day. She often stayed out all night. Her friends were almost all at Christ Church and Magdalen. She was promiscuous. She chain-smoked, she lived on her nerves.
After initial sensations of bourgeois revulsion against Kitty, Rachel became very fond of her. She came and stayed for a few days one vacation with Rachel’s parents in Barnes and it was a thoroughly quiet, happy occasion. Rachel, too, was asked to stay at Throxton Winnards – an extraordinary experience for one of her background: the great seventeenth-century house with its large old black rooms, its smell of woodsmoke, its guns and antlers and sculptures; and in the midst of it, Lord Longmore himself. The Chells did not go in for country-house living as one might read about such a phenomenon in books. It was more country-house huddling, country-house running for a bucket when the roof leaked, country-house shivering, even in May, around the huge log fire in the hall.
Rachel continued to regard Kitty as a friend, as a very good friend, even when, after Oxford, their ways began to diverge. They continued to meet; but when a friendship has become a matter of arranging to meet, dates in diaries, agreement that next week or the next are ‘no good’, then it has been silently acknowledged that the old intimacy has gone. Sometimes periods of several months would pass without their meeting. Kitty knew that Rachel was having an affair with L. P. Watson – she was one of very few who had known. Rachel remained, likewise, abreast of Kitty’s love life. But as life went by, they confided in one another less and less. Rachel reached a point in her affair with L.P. when she did not want anyone to know how it was going – largely because she did not want to know this herself. Kitty, on occasion, looked deeply ill, and this, again, was something Rachel did not want to ask about.
And now Kitty was dead, and the stark cruelty of this fact confronted Rachel not only as a bitter loss, but also, as by tradition a memento mori should, as a challenge to examine her own life. Kitty’s death sealed off her own, Rachel’s, studenty youth, and those things which she had done, and not done, with her twenties. Even in bitterest grief, Rachel could not be sentimental about herself. It was illogical to wish that the past could be changed. Therefore she did not wish it. She had known, however, with an extraordinary clarity, from the moment she heard of Kitty’s death, that she could not go on living as she had been.
In a bleak way, R
achel felt she owed her new-found freedom to Kitty. Her friend’s death had given her back her dignity. She had left the Legion – posted her letter of resignation that morning. She had also left L. P. Watson.
The moment in the wine bar, witnessed by Sinclo Manners and Peg Montgomery, had been the beginning of forty-eight hours of intensely painful conversations with L.P. When he had told her that Julia had found out about their long affair, she had felt a confused collection of emotions – relief, excitement, fear. For some time, she had been wondering about her relationship with L.P. She was in love with him, or at least she assumed she was because the situation made her cry a lot and she could not imagine how life would be if he were to drop her. Almost every aspect of the affair had become personally unsatisfactory to her. She suffered all the disadvantages of the mistress of a married man. She could only see him on his own terms, sometimes for as little as a few hours a week. Their relationship had to be kept a secret because of who he was and his position on The Daily Legion.
Sometimes, she thought that her hatred of The Daily Legion, which grew week by week, was as big a barrier between them as his marriage. He was impatient with her disgust at the paper, and obviously felt implicated in her moral and aesthetic revulsion against the world of Lennox Mark, Martina, Mary Much, Worledge. The L.P. with whom she was in love was a ruined archangel. He was the poet and traveller who had been sucked into journalism malgré lui, and she was disturbed by evidences of his revelling in it. His friendship with Mary Much, his hours on the telephone or the e-mail to the editor of Gloss should have told its own tale, but to Rachel Pearl, it did not. She was jealous of Mary but, because she felt this emotion to be trivial and unworthy, she had deliberately turned a blind eye to the implications of the friendship.
Similarly, it had suited her for nearly eight years to pity her ruined archangel for being trapped in a loveless marriage. She had, on a few agonizing occasions, been invited to dinner at the Watsons’ house in Clapham, its interiors made by Julia as immaculate as she made the atmosphere intolerable. Rachel, of course, had entered the house merely as a friend and colleague of L.P.’s together with many other journalists of both sexes. No one present had guessed that L.P. was her lover. She had supposed herself to be a pained observer of an unhappy marriage. She had never allowed herself to ask why Julia was so unhappy, why she lost her temper so often and so readily with L. P., both at home and at parties.
