by A. N. Wilson
‘Look,’ said Rachel, ‘you can’t do this.’
‘If you don’t mind, madam …’ said a WPC. There was heavy irony in her emphasis on the word ‘madam’.
‘I do mind, and you just can’t do this. Those people came into this house unasked. This is a private house. That man deliberately upset potato peelings all over a perfectly clean floor, just so they could take some filthy picture for their stinking paper.’
‘So, who’s this being so hoity-toity?’ said the photographer. He turned and leered at her. Beneath a smudge of revolting pubic moustache the evil smile made a row of uneven orange panatella-smoker’s fangs. ‘L. P. Watson’s little whore?’
Some minutes later, Rachel Pearl, the kitchen-helper called Lance and the asylum seeker, a twenty-five-year-old man called Thimjo, found themselves being bundled into the back of a van and driven to the police station.
EIGHTEEN
Just for a change, Mary Much and Martina Fax had abandoned Diana’s for the restaurant at Granville Stoppard, a penthouse at the top of the store which looked across the dripping plane boughs to the sodden green of Hyde Park and, beyond, to the rain-sprayed, opalescent surface of the Serpentine.
The Legion, which lay between them, had a photograph which, as both women agreed, could have been anyone. They meant, it could have been anyone being arrested, since it was of a man holding a book against his face while he slumped in the back of a police car. The pictures inside were a little better.
‘How can people live like that?’ Martina asked, scratching with a scarlet talon at a photo of the upended rubbish bin, and the tea-leaves and potato peelings all over the vicarage floor.
‘Darling, it’s no worse than you and Lennie, the week before you got Piet!’
‘It’s looking like that now again!’ She added, ‘Now Piet’s stopped working.’
Mary Much just murmured, ‘Piet’ gently and mournfully, almost to herself. She was wearing a white leather trouser-suit and a very pale pink mohair jumper. Somehow, with her newer, shorter hair, whose peroxide suggested that some electrical shock had been administered to her entire system, she had lost some of her Arthurian-enchantress qualities and now resembled one of the more alarming intergalactic dominatrices in science fiction aimed at an adult market. Martina, in all ways more conservative, retained her coppery hair, and since without further surgical attention she would have been unequipped to alter the perpetual mirthless smile, she left it be, that same impressive combination of crimson gloss and orthodontic reorganization. (Martina wore a neat little green CD suit which revealed her pin-like legs.)
‘He was – is – a little strange, that boy,’ said Martina, ‘but it was clever of me – wasn’t it – to get him?’
‘Darling – you were a genius.’
Martina clapped her hands together excitedly and said, ‘Darling, we must order.’
At Granville Stoppard they didn’t do the lovely mango and peach thingy they served at Diana’s, half and half with Dom Perignon. The women risked the Buck’s Fizz but agreed it wasn’t a patch. At least there was lobster and there were chips: a consoling constant when one had worries.
And they were worried. About Lennie-Wennie’s mun-mun, or lack of it. About the situation in Africa. About the boy. Martina had lived life on a high wire. Lennie had not, and he did not always have her knack of jumping sometimes, as from the Wall, quite literally from one zone of danger to the next, nearly always to her own advantage. To have got the boy was genius. Martina’s fears, and Mary’s, had been aroused quite early on, though they had not been voiced so much as mimed, with screwy gestures of fingers to the side of the head and in the case of Mary, who still had facial muscles, hilarious, squinting evocations of idiocy. But what did one do when he started to say he thought Lennie was his dada?
This unanswered question, unanswered by all, was joined in a queue of unanswered questions in the minds of Martina and Mary Much. Then they had discovered – both discoveries more or less coinciding – that the boy had stolen one of their teeny recording thingies, and that he knew the ghastly old bender. The monk who made Lennie’s life such a misery with all his communist rubbish about boo-hoo let’s feel sorry for the slaves, miners, whatever they were supposed to be.
Martina’s instincts, what Mary called her Martennae, said, Stop! Too risky. Too many things to go wrong. It was clumsy old Len who charged ahead. They’d perhaps told him too much about the boy – his quite preternatural capacity to adapt, his willingness to do and say what was required. But this was a high wire on to which Martina would not have, herself, advised Lennie to tread, this Old Bongo Monka Benda stuff. Might there not be a reckoning? An establishment of the facts? A discovery, at the most simple level, that the tape had been doctored by some expert in surveillance acquired by Kurtmeyer; that the boy confronting some old bender happened on one occasion and the old priest apologizing happened on some quite different occasion, when he was speaking – rather awkward fact, this – to a woman; to a woman – even more awkward fact – who had obviously been the old man’s …
It was facts which were troubling: facts, and the specific. Both women had spent their lives avoiding both, and so it was no surprise that they had triumphed in the world of journalism. They had learned so well together to cultivate their natural gifts for remembering, yet not remembering. They had instinctively known for so long what to say and what to keep hidden. Both in all likelihood had censors in their brains which edited events as they happened, allowing some to be altered, others to be eliminated from the records. Perhaps some such witty but unspoken irony had led them now to lunch in this very store, Granville Stoppard, where, thirty years before, the two women had first met.
In those days, the cocktail bar on the top floor had been a recognized place to meet the more discerning client. Martina had been in practice before such helps to work as telephone numbers left in kiosks. Whether she would have sunk so low in any event was a good question, since it had never been her habit, once she had arrived in England, to touch anything but the upper end of the market. The lunch-time crowd in the bar at Granville Stoppard were the richer businessmen, lawyers and foreign visitors. For the really pricey ones, she relied on contacts, introductions, word-of-mouth reference – in those days no Cabinet minister or bishop would want to try even so discreet a venue as Granville Stoppard for viewing the goods.
Naturally, the shop had its reputation to keep up, and very occasionally the young women were asked to move on. Perhaps Martina had unwontedly had a glass too many. Perhaps her words – forgotten now in form or detail, though their sense was recalled vividly enough – had been too unsubtle. Whatever the reason, her interlocutor, who turned out to be a store detective, had asked her to move on. Leave the shop. Nothing so obvious as a scuffle occurred, but she could still recollect the shame as he had accompanied her into the lift, and down to the ground floor, out through Make-up and towards the glass doors. Beyond, she recollected, the Knightsbridge day was surprisingly bright – much brighter than the artificially lit world of the bar from which she was being excluded. Well-heeled hippies, long-haired men in flared trousers, droopy girlfriends in flowery T-shirts. Gandalf Lives! All You Need Is Love. Oh no, darling, she had thought, all you need is lolly, as the Beatles fucking well know.
But as she and the store detective had advanced to this bright early-seventies world, it was the fracas in Make-up which drew all eyes. A young woman – in those days just a few years made a difference, and this frail Marianne Faithfull lookalike was significantly younger than Martina herself – was being rudely stopped by the store detective.
‘I never said I’d paid for it …’
‘And you left the store …’
‘Like I said …’
There was not a cockney accent, but the basically middle-class voice attested to its aspirations, its imaginative home at that era – namely, Stones concerts, parties which lasted all night, happenings in Covent Garden piazza presided over by John Peel … So the words were o
n the edge of ‘loik Oi said’, but nothing like so cocknified as that. It was the way Mick, Marianne, all that crowd spoke. This was no member of the exalted crowd, however, but someone on a par with the shop girls and the store detective. Mary Much in those days did indeed work in a boutique, half a mile away down the King’s Road. It was only months since she had moved out, for good, from her parents’ semi-detached in Reading. She had come into Granville Stoppard quite regularly to steal clothes. It was easy if all you lived on was dope and black coffee and your body was thin as spaghetti. Sometimes, she could get two or three Mary Quant dresses on, one on top of the other, before scampering out of the shop. She sold them at a ‘nearly new’ place between the department store and the boutique where she herself worked.
‘Like I said, I came over faint. I just stepped outside to get some air.’
‘But you are still wearing …’
‘I know I’m still wearing …’
‘Would you step this way, madam, I’d like you to come into the manager’s office.’
All in an instant, Martina had taken the situation into her own hands. She spoke in English, but with the thrill of it all, her words were inverted.
‘With me, come – please.’
She had reached out, and taken Mary Much’s hand. The Marianne Faithfull, who literally did have a garland of flowers in her hair, had immediately recognized the gesture. Partners in different crimes, and hand in hand, they had run out into the sunny afternoon. The screams of the store detectives, the pursuit of them, had been ineffectual. The taxi had come to their aid at once. And they had driven off in the direction of Park Lane, still holding hands on the back seat.
Nothing had happened on that afternoon. That is to say, the affair which developed between the two women was a thing of much, much later in their story. They had merely held hands and giggled, as they got away. Martina had wanted – this she told Mary in later years – to take her back to the flat in Park Lane (where she worked – but these words had not been used) and make love to her there and then. But instead, they had gone to a chi-chi little Italian café in North Audley Street, not far from the American Embassy, where the (in Martina’s judgement) silly people had demonstrated against the Vietnamese war. They had not even exchanged names on that occasion – just drunk their coffee together for perhaps twenty minutes, and talked of nothings, and giggled. Martina was in her late, Mary in her early, twenties.
When, some years later, they had ‘met’, the recognition had been instantaneous. It had been at a party. Mary Much, who had won the Vogue talent competition, was working on that magazine. Martina, after a year slogging it out in Features on the Legion, had begun to write her spirited column – the voice of young womanhood.
The success of their relationship, the deepest thing in either of their lives, was that they had never prised it apart with too much questioning, or too much confidence in the power of truth to make them free. On the contrary, both had enough experience of life to know that the truth would have landed them in prison. It was a lifetime’s habit, in both cases, of adjusting the truth which had enabled them to reach their present plateaux of contentment. So it was that Mary met Martina for the first time at that party, and neither of them in thirty years had ever made any allusion to the previous encounter in the department store, nor of Martina’s rescue of Mary from arrest, nor their ride, shaking with girlish laughter, in the taxi. All that was given, understood, and forgotten. Mary’s past was what she chose to make it – as far as anyone else was concerned, she began life when she won the Vogue talent competition. Martina the journalist had already transmogrified her past. The one-eyed old lady with whom she shared her apartment and her life was now the widow of a Swiss medical professor, heroic in his attempts to rescue unfortunates from the Third Reich – when they came his way – and who had sadly died when Martina was in her infancy. The Basel childhood of impeccable Zwinglian rectitude, with maiden aunts, was a mere sketch, an allusion, if the past was ever referred to: one does not wish to bore people by talking about oneself all the time!
Thus it was the two women had got by, knowing and not knowing. The affair had had many ups and downs. They were never publicly a couple, though all thought of them as inseparable comrades. For long stretches, when one or the other had men in their lives, the bedroom side of things went into abeyance. Both women had known, from the acute jealousy suffered during such periods, that they could not risk quarrelling with one another. The pain was bad enough to be mistaken for love. It had outlasted Mary’s much-needed affair with the Duke (needed because sometimes a woman in her position requires not just the jewels but the cachet, something sturdy to put in the inner curriculum vitae which she secretly peruses); it had outlasted, and in its complicated way was entwined with, Martina’s marriage to Len. Certainly, their feelings of jealousy about the new boy were not going to get in the way of a love as old or as twiningly persistent.
‘What if Piet denies the story? What if the Old Bender makes him deny it?’ There was real panic in Martina’s voice.
‘No smoke without fire, darling. Won’t people think that?’
‘What if the Bender sues? He’s grand – he’s really a lord …’
‘Monty Longmore’s his brother,’ said Mary Much, as if to explain everything. She let out a long breath, and somewhere in the middle of this smoky exhalation, words began.
‘Whatever happens – front pages like this …’
She tapped the crappy headline.
‘FATHER FAGIN,’ said Martina. ‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Fagin’s a character in a musical, darling. “Food, glorious food.” ’
‘No one under sixty’s going to know that. We made a mistake with Worledge, darling.’
‘We’ meant ‘you’. Mary Much heard all the aggro in Martina’s tone. She knew every nuance and echo of meaning in her speech patterns.
‘It’s not too late …’ she said, with vivid garrotte-mimes, placing her two hands round that neck whose incipient broiler’s scrawn was so fetchingly concealed by pink mohair polo.
‘We always thought Mr Blimby had more class,’ said Martina, to the middle distance.
‘L.P. won’t be pleased.’
‘L.P.’s a mess.’
They ate a few more chips and smoked another ciggie apiece.
‘So, when Kurtmeyer closes down the Sunday and the two titles merge …’
‘Bye, Worledge!’ Mary Much’s voice had become high-pitched, girlish, a thirties flapper waving to a subaltern going away to war by train. ‘Byeee …!’
‘And Piet?’
There was a long silence.
‘You know poor Hans?’ asked Mary Much. It was the first time since the explosion, and the calamity, that the friends had been on the verge of confronting the mystery.
Martina’s scarlet claw came towards her lover’s face. For a split second Mary feared that like a vengeful Fury she was going to scratch, but a fingertip merely came to rest on Mary’s pink lips. Mary kissed, then gently nibbled it.
NINETEEN
‘Philosophers scorn the argument from design,’ said Lennox Mark. ‘But take something as complex as the optic nerve. Now a Darwinian will tell you that it evolved. Gradually.’
He forked in pommes de terres dauphinoises.
‘Was it Lloyd George who said that in politics you can’t cross a chasm in two leaps?’
Mr Blimby stared, wondering whether this was some kind of trick question. He had heard about these theological conversations, but he had never been intimate with the Chairman, and so had never been subjected to one before.
‘It’s the same with Creation,’ said Lennox. ‘No way can you persuade me that the optic nerve evolved, for fuck’s sakes. Have you ever examined the complexity of that goddamn thing?’
Mr Blimby was shy to admit a failure to have done so. He had heard the rumours, just as everyone else had. The two Legions, the Daily and the Sunday, would merge. The staff of the Sunday would be ditched. That
shit Worledge would become editor-in-chief of the whole paper; someone else, possibly L.P., possibly another, would edit the ‘comment’ section of the Sunday. He, Blimby, would be chucked out.
He had not dared to tell his wife about these rumours, but she, of course, had heard them, down on the Sussex farm. She had leaned her bum against the Aga and said, in that hard, direct manner which he found so terrifying: ‘If they’re sacking you, make sure you don’t accept less than half a million.’
He knew that there might well be newspaper proprietors who were able to hand out sums like that to departing editors. He also knew that Lennox Mark was not such a proprietor. Sal’s utterly unsympathetic, calculating remark sounded like a threat. He felt that unless he brought home half a mill at the end of the week, he would be facing more than just dismissal as editor. Would he mind it if she ditched him? Certainly, he would miss neither her, nor his teenaged children, who towered over and intimidated him. Both children – Henry at Eton, Fiona at Marlborough – had caught from their mother and her parents the sense that Dad was not quite. If allusion had to be made to Grandpa – Simon’s dad – they always said he had been a ‘medic’, rather than a dentist. Simon had even heard Sal at dinner parties guffaw, ‘That’s what I got for marrying a surgeon’s son.’ Simon felt himself despised by all of them, not merely because of his size and manner but because they were unconvinced. The loud braying voice, which he had adopted when an undergraduate at Trinity Hall; the supposed enthusiasm for shooting; the aristocratic friends at his London club … none of them could disguise the fact that he was a grammar-school boy whose father was a dental surgeon. In no other world but Sal’s bogus, snobby county set would this harmless fact have been shaming.
It would be a relief, in a way, to be ditched, and to start all over again. But Mr Blimby was fifty-one, and starting would not be easy. He would not miss his wife and children at all; in fact, he detested them. But he would deeply miss the shooting weekends; the overnight stays in grand houses; these (he did not kid himself) would evaporate without Sal to stage-manage them.
