by A. N. Wilson
This line of questioning threw Ed into a panic. He had heard himself stammering, felt himself breaking out into a sweat with quite inarticulated sensations of guilt. They had something on him – but what it was, he could not say. He assured them that they must be making a mistake, that his sons would not be capable of violent crime or burglary – they were being educated at one of the most expensive schools in south London. Nevertheless, the police did insist on following up their investigations, and visited the house in Dulwich. It was then that Carol, indignant on her boys’ behalf, and everlastingly suspicious of Ed, insisted that her husband ‘come clean’.
‘You know what it is they are asking – you must know something you’re not telling them.’
That had been her line from the first. Clearly, with her obsessive memory of the (non-existent) man in the bar at the Amsterdam hotel, Carol supposed that the DNA samples left at Lennox Mark’s house were somehow or other linked to her husband’s secret gay life. Her own, unscientific, belief was that a drop of Ed’s semen had been found on one of the burglars’ jackets or trousers. Since he had got a very good job again at the Legion, Carol had been fond of Ed, and their marriage had been unwontedly happy. All that now evaporated once more. They had rows, either directly or indirectly, about the DNA evidence, even though neither of them knew what this evidence could possibly be. Late at night, their sons, from the privacy of their bedrooms, would hear Carol screaming at Ed that if he was as innocent as he said he was, he’d write to Lennox Mark and ask for him to clear the whole thing up with the police.
It was by no means obvious what there was to clear up. Nevertheless, Ed had made several attempts to see the Chairman in his offices at LenMar House. So far, none of these efforts had been successful. After he’d rung Lennie Mark’s secretary three times asking for an appointment, Blimby had asked him, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Fine, fine, thanks.’
‘Only, I gather you’ve been trying to see the Chairman. Hope you’re not trying to bankrupt the paper by asking for a bigger salary!’
Tiny Blimby made that harrumphing bellow of his.
You couldn’t keep secrets in that bloody building.
TWENTY-FIVE
48c Kinglake Road,
Streatham,
London SW 16
Dear Lennox
I have tried several times to ring you, but of course, it has always been a secretary and ‘Could I ask what it’s concerning?’
Lennox, you know what it’s concerning, but I can’t tell it to a secretary. Believe me, I am only trying to get in touch with you because I want what is best for Peter, for my son. I don’t suppose it will ever be possible to undo all the damage which Peg Montgomery’s article in the Legion last week has done. The stuff about me was a load of rubbish for a start and if I was into suing people it would probably be a libel (slander?). But that’s not what it’s about, Lennox.
Lennox, you know what happened between us seventeen years ago, and I haven’t asked for anything from you. You offered me money – remember? – and that wasn’t what it was about, either, believe me. I just felt so hurt by that at the time.
Lennox, I’ve got to see you. You understand that, don’t you? Think what this is doing to me. Peter is a very disturbed young man. He can certainly be a danger to himself, and I am beginning to be afraid that he will be a danger to others. Since all this has blown up, he has gone missing.
I don’t know what to believe any more.
Is it true he has been working in your house? We were told he was in some posh restaurant. Then he said he was working for you, but he lives in a world of dreams.
Please, Lennox. I’m not asking for money, I’m not asking for publicity. But you know why I’m asking to see you, and it’s not fair to palm me off, it isn’t.
Mercy Topling
346 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Dear Mrs Topling
Your letter of 17 July has been forwarded to us by our client. Our client acknowledges that you worked as a stenographer at The Daily Legion from July to December 1985. You worked as his assistant. When you left the paper, you approached our client with a number of imputations which he strenuously denies. He offered you a sum of money as a goodwill gesture, and it was in no way intended to confirm your story. You rejected that money.
Our client wishes you to know that he believes your story is highly defamatory. Any attempt to repeat it, either in letters to himself, in telephone calls, or in conversation with others, will result in his feeling obliged to prosecute you.
Yours faithfully
Squibble Illegible
PP Oliver Golightly
Signed in the absence of Mr Golightly from the office
Lennox
This is frankly disgraceful. Look, you know what I am talking about. It is PATHETIC to drag lawyers into this. In my previous letters, I have only referred in a very tactful way to You Know What. But, Lennox, we are talking here about the life of a boy – MY SON – OUR SON!! You know that while I was working for you, we had an affair. I am not claiming any money. I am not pretending you took advantage of me. We were both grown-ups, I knew the facts of life. But, Lennox, I became pregnant and I’m telling you that Peter is our son. I don’t care what the law says, you have a moral obligation to help me find him.
Whether you had anything to do with that Peg Montgomery article in the Legion or not, Lennox, my mother was fooled into giving that interview, and what it says is frankly CRAP. Father Vivyan is worth ten of you and you know it. He is not a child molester. I could tell you more if you would only let me meet you.
Since that article appeared, Peter has gone missing. Lennox, he could be YOUR son and the article appeared in YOUR paper.
I am just asking for ten minutes of your time. If you’re so bloody high and mighty you can’t see me, then I’m asking for your help in finding Peter. I don’t think you understand what I was saying in my last letter. Lennox, Peter is mentally disturbed. He has not been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but whatever it is, he needs help.
Please, please do not palm me off with another lawyer’s letter. This is so cruel. You don’t know what this is doing to my family, Lennox.
M. Topling
Dear Mrs Topling
You will see from the enclosed documentation that we have this morning, from Her Honour Judge Marcelle Rosenburg, in the High Courts, obtained an injunction to prevent you from attempting to write, telephone or have any further contact with our client. He vigorously denies the statements you have been making about the nature of your relationship. We repeat our warning that if you continue to repeat these allegations, we shall be obliged to prosecute you for criminal defamation of our client’s character. We need not remind you that the consequences of being found guilty in such a case would be the imprisonment of the defendant and the confiscation of her assets.
We remain your obedient servants.
Yours faithfully
Signed in Mr Golightly’s absence while fishing in Ireland
‘He’s worried. That’s for certain.’
‘Lennie?’
‘Mmm, darling.’
Martina and Mary Much were at their usual table at Diana’s. The usual aioli, the usual chips, the usual lobsters, the usual cigarettes.
‘Everything all right, your ladyship?’ asked the waiter.
Mmmm, that felt good.
Mary had been surprised by the extent to which she had minded, really minded this: Martina’s excitement about the peerage. All manner of deep, atavistic national pieties came up, not to the surface, but close to it.
She sometimes wondered whether Martina had forgotten that it had all been her idea, her marrying Lennie.
‘It was a surprise,’ Martina was saying. ‘I didn’t think Lennie was into that sort of thing …’
Her frozen, sewn-up moue moved by a fraction, and she laughed.
‘Blicks?’ asked Mary Much brightly.
‘I meant sex, actually,’ said Martina. And then, as she l
et out a long blast of smoke from her nostrils, she looked up at Mary and smirked.
My God, Mary thought, there was a bit of self-pity in that smirk, a bit of fucking pathos. This woman was asking her to sympathize with her because she did not have to fuck the great heffalump, whose idea of conversation was cricket scores and theology and whose appetite for food was so much stronger than it was for – one. Christ, this really did take the biscuit.
Mary had always hated the way her best friend’s scale of morality revolved round self-pity. Okay, boo-hoo, she’d been a poor little slut in East Berlin, and she’d dragged her mother over the Wall like a sack of potatoes. Martina spoke and behaved in a way which suggested that this unmentionable and unmentioned fact gave her carte blanche to behave absolutely as she liked. That really got on Mary’s tits.
They had never mentioned to one another that they had first met when Mary was a shop assistant and Martina was on the game, sitting in the bar at the top of Granville Stoppard getting squiffy and hoping she’d meet her sugar daddy. But this fact, though never mentioned, of course determined the subsequent course of their friendship. When they had both in their different ways got their breaks, when Martina Fax had become the trenchant columnist and Mary Much the aspirant Queen of the Glossies, then they were emotionally ready for friendship. Martina had the staying power, the brains, the guts to carry herself from triumph to triumph. But even she would not have had the idea of bagging the proprietor if it hadn’t been for Mary Much’s ‘Don’t go to bed with him, God no. Marry him, darling.’
By ‘don’t go to bed’ she hadn’t meant never go to bed with him. But if they hadn’t, they hadn’t. That was their business. Mary wanted very much to tell Martina that she wasn’t missing anything. Instead, she discovered, cold and fully formed like a statue made of ice, the thought of how she wanted to live the next five to ten years of her life. She wanted Lennie to pay Martina off. She, Mary Much, decided it was her turn to become Lady Mark.
‘He was all for seeing the woman.’
‘The Blik Lady?’
‘The nigger,’ said Martina, picking up a chip, dipping it in aioli and then putting it down.
‘There’d have been no harm, surely?’
‘Are you mad? He really did it with her – he did it. Can you imagine that? I asked him where – in an hotel? At the Savoy? He said, in the office – in the office – in hotels, several times, apparently. Perhaps that is what he has been into all these years, since African days. Niggers.’
Mary Much knew exactly what Lennie was ‘into’.
‘Lovely article this morning, darling,’ she said, patting the Legion which, as always, lay on the table beside them.
‘Was it okay?’
‘It was, in the circumstances’ – Mary smiled – ‘very broadminded of you.’
Since coming to live in this country from Switzerland [Martina had written], I have been proud to call myself British. Proud because this country was based on decent values, treating everyone as equal, regardless of race or religion.
But in the criticism of General Bindiga, I have heard something which is downright ugly.
Under the cloak of saying they disapprove of Zinariya, many so-called English liberals have been simple racists.
The issue is quite clear. If you don’t support what General Bindiga is doing, you are a racist. He is the only man in his country who is on the side of decency, law and order. He is trying, against enormous odds, to keep the industrial and agricultural life of his country going against the assaults of communists and terrorists.
Those who attack Bindiga use words – like ‘savagery’ – which they would never use of a white man …
‘It’s true,’ said Martina, pompously.
‘He’s really coming to the ceremony? At the House of Lords?’
‘Lennie’s being introduced to the Lords during the General’s State Visit. We’re going to have the General as our guest of honour at the lunch.’
There was something so breathtakingly pompous about this that Mary almost wondered whether it would be possible to take Lennie away from his wife before the Bindiga State Visit. Probably not – even if they forced a quickie divorce. Still, it was useful to know that they had never – ever-wever? – done it.
‘So, you never knew he was into …’
Martina did not need much prompting. She was, by her standards positively forthcoming.
‘I’m amazed,’ she said, ‘that he has ever done anything which could have made someone, even a deranged nigger, think he’d made her pregnant.’
‘What is he’ – ickle-wickle giggle – ‘what is he into, then?’
Mary thought that in Martina’s sigh of a reply, she heard her whole life-history. It was not said in the tone of a wife. It was the voice of a bored prostitute who carried within her brain a menu of uncongenial activities which her clients might or might not wish her to perform.
‘Can’t you guess? Just oral. Basically, with Lennie, if you can’t eat it, it doesn’t exist.’
Mary’s curiosity about other people’s sexual lives knew no bounds; but she knew when, in the conversational warfare of best friends, to hold back, when to seize an advantage by apparent indifference. She longed to know just what the opaque phrase meant – did Lennie still ‘eat’ in the sense described, or did such behaviour belong to his early days with Martina? Did she just sit there, filing her nails or watching television with that frozen, bored expression on her face, while he slurped and grunted between her legs? She did not imagine that Lennie had ever got Martina to eat him. That was too much to expect.
‘Darling, that shirt of yours …’
Martina named the designer.
‘I know, but on you – you can get away with it – it’s just divine.’
Before Martina had a chance to feign too much pleasure, Mary Much added, ‘It looks so much better than the little coat you were wearing yesterday. Frankly, that wasn’t you, darling.’
TWENTY-SIX
The allotments spread out higgledy-piggledy over a tract of land, some four acres, adjoining the sprawl of the cemetery. In fine summer weather, they made a comforting sight in this largely uncomforted area of south London. Smoke would rise from carefully contained bonfires, signs of something like domesticity. Each small patch of land was different, tokening the independence and freedom of those who cultivated it, and the variety of purposes which the allotment served in the lives of Crickledenians. Some of these patches, let out to tenants on a yearly basis, had been cultivated by the same families for generations, stretching back to the Second World War when this patch of wasteland was first planted, in the campaign to ‘dig for victory’. Such plots were in effect smallholdings, with onions, potatoes, lettuces, beans, peas springing obediently from the well-sifted black soil in regimented rows. Other allotments, the diversion of younger vegetable-growers, were sometimes planted more haphazardly, with failed experiments – unstaked sunflowers, canted like drunken giants to the earth; slug-eaten courgettes; artichokes which had bolted or run to seed. Some plots were given over chiefly to flowers, a summer long, from early sweet peas to late chrysanthemums, of blooms to be taken home as bouquets. The more favoured plots boasted sheds, and here again, the variety of human requirement and character was announced by the difference between, on the one hand, brand-new, fresh-creosoted prefabricated efforts delivered by van and set down that season, and sun-bleached wobbly constructions whose few panes of glass were thick with the cobwebs and dust encrustations of the years. Some of the sheds were strictly functional, sentry-boxes containing the bare essentials of horticultural tools. Others, beside the spade or rake required to stick in the earth and use as a makeshift coat-hanger, were almost more like inland beach-huts: little kingdoms where tea could be brewed, newspapers perused, cigarettes smoked, dreams dreamed. The presence in a few huts of day-beds and mattresses was suggestive in some cases of afternoon naps, in others of discreet romantic liaisons.
But for months now, the allotments had been
a desolate paddy-field, as rain followed rain. Many gardeners had not even planted this year; the weather was so unfavourable that there had been no weekend when the ground could be dug, and forked over, or the vegetables planted out. In consequence, in many patches, nature had taken over. Grass, briar, varieties of wild clematis, sorrel, and rosebay willow herb rampaged where runner beans or globular dahlias might, the previous year, have provided their splash of colour. Japanese knotweed, aggressive and abundant, strayed from neglected plots to those areas of land which a few doughty gardeners had attempted to cultivate. The efforts of these brave individuals had been all but destroyed by tempests. Canes had no sooner been erected into ingenious tripods to train the trailing bean or pea than near gale-force winds blew them over. Any plants poking more than a few centimetres above the soil were flattened by storms; and so much rain had fallen that root artichokes, potatoes, carrots had all rotted; radishes had swollen to grotesque, but tasteless proportions.
One such gardener who had defied the weather, and tried to dig and turn the squelching, recalcitrant soil, to sow and to plant in the resultant mud patch, was Solomon Farr, a seventy-five-year-old man who had been a devotee of the allotments for half a century. Sol had been a fireman in the days of steam, working for the LMS railway before it was taken into public ownership, and then for British Railways and British Rail. When he retired he was a guard on the Southern Region. He had been as dismayed as all his generation had been by the decline of the railways. The allotment had been his consolation, particularly when his wife had become ill. For weeks now, he had not been seen. The police had searched his own allotment hut, but they had not scoured the whole four acres, nor opened every hut in the place. Afterwards, they were criticized for this rudimentary negligence, but, in their defence, it had to be said that no one had seen him for weeks, either at the allotment, or anywhere else. Only when the fine weather came, and a couple called the Fentons once more resumed their routine of going to their hut on the allotment to drink tea from a Thermos flask, were the remains discovered. It was an unsolved murder; apparently without motive. Hardly anyone had known Sol, except his wife – now in residential care, with her hip, and, since the news was broken to her, showing signs of confusion – their daughter, who did her best to visit her parents but lived an awkward journey away in Hemel Hempstead, and a few neighbours. Like many, perhaps most, men of seventy-five, Sol Farr had kept himself to himself.
