And perhaps, with his background, he had plenty to make scenes about, I thought. Plummer hadn’t liked him, that was clear.
‘And you want me to poke around Rissington Abbey without declaring my interest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Difficult.’
‘I understood that that was what I was paying for.’ He stood up.
I didn’t. ‘Do you have a transcript of the inquest?’
‘Yes, but—’ He just wanted to get rid of me now, and he saw I was going to insist. ‘Very well. Get Mrs Sweet to photocopy this for you on the way out ...’
Chapter Two
Mrs Sweet photocopied the transcript of the inquest for me in Plummer’s outer office. She was fiftyish, with blonde-grey hair in a bun, good ankles, expensive shoes, and a forbidding manner. I’d no chance of getting information out of her, I felt, so I didn’t try. I wasn’t too nice to her, either. It’s easy to feel patronized, if you’re a secretary. So many office visitors chatter condescendingly, thinking they’re being good with the help.
I took the photocopied pages, stuffed them in my bag, and ran down the stairs to the street. I don’t take lifts when it’s less than five floors exercise.
Outside, it was five o’clock and the Strand was packed with workers going home. I don’t mind London crowds.They’re basically harmless, and there’s hardly a person among them who wouldn’t stop to help if they were really needed. Most people like helping strangers, it’s easier.
Usually I’m in a hurry to get home myself, but not tonight. I had no solitary flat to look forward to, because Polly had bullied me into giving a party. So I chose to take a bus, knowing the journey would take at least an hour. That was OK, though. I’d helped Polly with food, drink, and cleaning all morning. The flat was ready; I’d even padlocked the French windows in my living-room to stop anyone going out onto the mock balcony. It was lethal, actually: a gardening-mad previous owner had made a platform for window-boxes, but made it balcony-size and given it little railings. He’d apparently done his gardening one-handed, the other clinging to a spike firmly cemented to the wall of the house. Why he hadn’t just made a decent balcony I couldn’t imagine. But, give him his due, he had half-tiled the bathroom all the way round.
So when I got home all I’d have to do was moderate Polly’s efforts to smarten me up. I feel foolish with expensive clothes and make-up, like the only child at a fancy-dress party whose mother bought the costume ready-made.
Polly and I have the two flats in a converted house off Ladbroke Grove. She’d decided (unilaterally: I never give parties) that, work-wise, it would be a good move to signal my return to full health.
Last November. I’d had my leg broken in two places and spent nearly six weeks off my feet. After that, restricted mobility and months in physiotherapy. I’d only been able to do titbits of library research.
When at last I was fully mobile, I’d gone to Dublin with a German film company, working on a doco shoot on the history of Ireland. Next, back in London, I’d done the preliminary interviewing for a programme on the menopause. Now it was early June and it also happened to be my twenty-ninth birthday.
‘It’d be a good thing for everyone to see you’re perfectly healthy. You know what rumours are like . . .’ She was right: practically everyone in the media had heard that I was badly injured, but no one knew the details.
So we’d asked everyone who’d employed me in the past plus a few we hoped might, who I knew vaguely, plus any of my mates who were in the country. My friends are often abroad. The upside is that you get plenty of postcards. The other upside is that few of them are free to come to your parties. I’m not a hostess by temperament or training. I don’t like spending money on anything as transient as an evening’s pleasure, especially when, since I don’t enjoy parties myself, I’m not even sure that most people find it a pleasure.
But both our names were on the invitation, and people who wouldn’t turn out for Alex Tanner would certainly turn out for Polly Coyne, whether they’d met her or not. Although she’d retired from modelling two years ago, she’d been a huge name, one of those names you see in the gossip columns every week.
So even though I’d insisted we choose a Monday (Polly: That’s a terrible day for parties. Me: Yes. Good.) the acceptances rolled in and I was to be on parade, fit, like a come-back boxer before the big match, jogging up and down on the spot, blowing from puffed cheeks, and giving lightning jabs with my right to show that the reactions were still there.
The final tally of guests was about fifty. The house is well big enough for that; we were using both flats. Food and drink downstairs in Polly’s basement kitchen/dining-room, music for dancing in Polly’s ground-floor living-room, quieter sitting-out and talking-over music in my living-room.
As the bus butted its way along Victoria Street, I sat upstairs, leaning as far into the aisle as I could to escape the strong smell which I refused to analyse which was wafting its way from the young man (Schizophrenic? Should I, for the moment, provide Care in the Community?) muttering and shouting to himself in the window seat next to me. My mother was a schizophrenic, once. Now she’s in the twilight of Alzheimer’s disease in a hospital in the twilight of the North Circular, and I only feel guilty about her when I’m really reaching for something to feel guilty about. But I still find schizophrenics touching rather than repulsive so I didn’t move to another seat and I smiled at the young man when he caught my eye.
Outside, London was almost full of tourists. If you didn’t know what the city usually looked like you’d think it was bustling and prosperous, but native Londoners could see the recession everywhere. Fewer tourists. Empty taxis. Tables at any restaurant you chose, that day. Tickets for any theatre you chose, that day. Cut-rate deals at even the grand hotels. More and more ‘Going out of business’ sales in the shops, a ticker-tape parade’s worth of for sale signs on flats and houses, a metallic taste of imminent panic in the mouth showing as blank endurance on the faces. You could see what they were trying not to think. Is this what I re-elected the Conservatives for? Will I keep my job? How high can the mortgage interest rates go? How little is my flat worth this week?
I’d stopped even wanting to know the depths to which my flat’s value had plummeted. It was certainly worth thousands less than my mortgage. And the media business, my business, was on the skids. Very little work. Less payment. Even the big companies were defaulting now. I’d re-presented one invoice every month since last August, and I knew it’d never be paid. That’s why I worked for the German company, when I could. They were demanding, arrogant, and hysterical, but they paid.
The bus was now stuck in a traffic jam beside the walls of Buckingham Palace gardens. I looked through the leafy trees, past the lawns to the blank windows. Even the Royal Family was embattled. Fergie’s frolics. Diana’s marriage. Enormous Civil List allowances paid out of a bankrupt country’s taxes. Widespread resentment: the least the Royals could do is set a good example. OK, the divorce rate in England was the highest in Europe, but the Royals should be different. We paid them to be different. We paid them to be our fairy-tale. We needed a fairy-tale, not True Confessions.
On the one occasion I’d been to Buckingham Palace (an assignment, of course, not a garden party) I forgot not to turn my back on the Queen and was frogmarched from the room so fast my Docs didn’t touch the Aubusson. I don’t think the Queen noticed, but she might have been pretending out of courtesy, what with all her breeding. She can name not only her father but her grandfather and all the way back to the Conquest. I come from a proud tradition of single parents. As far as I know.
The royal standard was flying over Buckingham Palace, and I imagined her sitting up the far end of the long, bare room I’d met her in, asking herself, like all the rest of her subjects, ‘What went wrong?’ And, like most of her subjects, it wasn’t her fault. She’d been a decent old stick to me.
Change of scenery. The bus was now stuck in a traffic jam in Park Lane, between the fresh gr
een of the park and the towering, empty hotels. I was getting nearer home, and nearer the party, and my stomach beginning was beginning to churn. Not just because I hate parties, and because this was the first big one I’d ever given. But because, most of all, that evening I’d have to face Barty O’Neill again. Polly’d insisted we invite him, even though he and I haven’t spoken for months. But Polly’s been on my case to get in touch with him. She’s an incorrigible romantic. I wouldn’t be surprised if as far as she was concerned, the main reason for the party was to get Barty and me together again.
Barty is an independent producer in his early forties, intermittently my boss. He made a pass at me last November. November the ninth, actually, at 9.37 p.m. If I’m interested enough to remember the date and time, why hadn’t I responded?
Two reasons. The first is practical. I’m in a very chancy profession. I chose it for the freedom, but with the freedom goes the entirely unfree experience of being out of work, having no money, falling behind on your mortgage. I have absolutely no resources. As far as I know my only living relative is my mother. If my money runs out, that’s it.
It’s made me mean about unnecessary expenditure like food, if someone else isn’t buying it. I take multi-vitamin pill every day, expenses food or not, and when I’m not working I buy bruised vegetables and fruit from the Portobello Market. I curry the vegetables and eat them with bread. Luckily I like bread. I liquidize the fruit and drink it with milk. I saw someone do that in a movie. They were in a beach house in Santa Monica, wearing cut-off denims and a bikini top. When I drink it that’s how it makes me feel. One of my foster-mothers used to say, simple things please simple minds. Fantasy is cheap. It’s also undermining. You end up living in it. I have to be careful about that too.
Barty’s my most regular employer. Over the past four years he’s provided about sixty per cent of my income. Affairs can go very sour. My affairs usually do. Then he’d stop hiring me.
The second reason is personal. I only get involved with men I feel superior to, and protective about: men who are less likely to criticize me. Men who feel grateful for my attentions. I have a low body image. I can only make love in the dark, and even then I shut my eyes and hope the man has the courtesy to do the same.
I seldom feel superior to Barty. I’d hate to be a disappointment to him. I hate being a disappointment to people, and when I am I get aggressive. I’d known for years that he fancied me. But when he finally made his move I’d blown it so badly that, if he hadn’t been smooth and sweet about it, we probably wouldn’t have spoken again. But we had.
And then when I’d been injured and was in traction he’d had me to stay in his house – fixed up his library for a sick-room, arranged the nurses – and he’d been very careful not to intrude on me. I’d felt even more of a burden and I hate being grateful, so I’d made no demands at all, and sometimes in the long evenings when I began, in desperation, to teach myself Ancient Greek, I’d thought of Barty sitting in the drawing-room upstairs and wished I had the nerve to call him in for a chat. I liked talking to him. But he couldn’t have refused and I didn’t know if he really wanted to ... it had been a mess.
When I was better enough to leave I’d thanked him, of course, and gone home and waited for him to call. But he hadn’t, not even to offer me work. If it hadn’t been Barty I’d have thought he was sulking, but he’s not a sulker.
The work was the worst part. He was involved in a project abroad and he hadn’t told me what: most unusual. I’m his first choice as researcher, or at least I had been for the last few years.
Polly kept nagging me to ring him. She wanted to get us together. So, actually, did I, but I didn’t know how. I’m rotten with human relationships and I didn’t want to spoil this one. So we’d sent the invitation and he’d accepted it – Polly took his call – and I was only hours away from facing him.
By now the bus was in a traffic jam in Westbourne Grove and I tried to dismiss the party and to concentrate on my recent success instead. Plummer had hired me for an investigation . . . I should be pleased. According to Freud, I should be ecstatic: he defined happiness as the fulfilment of childhood dreams. In my childhood, I’d dreamt of being a private eye. I’d actually wanted to be a middle-aged male private eye in Los Angeles, but we all compromise.
I was a step nearer to earning my living as a private investigator. I’d actually been hired by a solicitor. OK, for a peanuts job. If it hadn’t been a peanuts job he wouldn’t have hired me. But if I did it well he’d hire me again. Maybe I’d get something juicier next time. Like a real live murder.
Chapter Three
The party turned out like nothing I expected. Mostly because Polly’s lover Clive chose that evening to tell Polly, already the Other Woman, that he had Yet Another Woman. Lousy timing. But perhaps there is never a good time for that kind of information; perhaps you should wait till the other person finds out. Perhaps he should just have tapered off the visits, the phone calls, until Polly herself said the magic words. Is it over? Much easier, then, to say yes and leg it for the door.
One positive aspect was that when he rang to break the news, ten minutes before the party was due to start (eight o’clock), Polly was in her bedroom putting the final touches to a very professional make-up job. On me. (She doesn’t think I pay enough attention to Presentation.) So when she slammed the phone down and started throwing things, I was close at hand to restrain her God knows it would have been a mess if she’d been in the kitchen. Wall-to-wall chicken mayonnaise, I expect. As it was I missed a difficult catch and her giant bottle of Poison shattered on the bookcase.
I didn’t think it was genuine pain; she’d been muttering about giving Clive the push for months. It was more that her pride was hurt. So it should have been. Not only is she a famous beauty, she’s also brainy enough to pass accountancy exams. She’s not a girl who has to say. Well, so he’s married, so he’s a backbench Labour MP, so he’s nearly bald, so he’s a bit of a git, but he’s the best I can do. The best Polly could do was stratospheric. But she’d chosen Clive. Fair enough.
I knew that nothing I said would be right but I had to say something while I wrestled with her. ‘Think about it tomorrow,’ I said. I was panicking. A party without Polly running it – I couldn’t. I’m a terrible hostess. Insecure, aggressive. Partly, I suppose, because I spent my childhood shuttling between foster-homes under the weary and moulting wing of the Social Services.‘Polly, please. Don’t leave me to do this without you – I can’t. Please.’
As I said it I heard the selfishness, but she didn’t. She’s very kind.She heard the fear,stopped struggling,and hugged me.‘Stupid sod,’ she said bitterly. ‘Stupid, stupid sod. Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll be fine. I’ll deal with him tomorrow. I’ll cry tomorrow.’
‘Loved the movie,’ I said facetiously. ‘Susan Hayward.’
‘Rita Hayworth.’
‘Wasn’t.’
‘Was.’
‘A quid says it was Rita Hayworth,’ said Polly, gritting her teeth.
‘OK, OK. It was Rita Hayworth.’ In the present circumstances I’d agree it was Michelle Pfeiffer. Which it probably would be in the remake.
Polly began to sob. ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ I said urgently, but she stepped up the sobs to a wail. The doorbell rang; I went down to open it; there stood Barty whose pass I’d fumbled last year as badly as Polly’s bottle of Poison, and who for some reason now took my breath away, almost as much as Polly’s ex-bottle of Poison. He’s tall and rangy and much stronger than he looks, and he stood in the doorway looking even taller in cream chinos and a dark blue silk shirt, sniffing suspiciously.
‘Poison,’ I said. ‘Perfume. Clive’s got Yet Another Woman.’
‘Ah,’ said Barty. ‘Drinks?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Gin and tonic?’
‘Stronger.’
‘Vodka Martini?’
‘Don’t forget the surgical spirit.’
‘Sorry I’m so early. Did Polly tell you
she’d asked me to come on the dot to help out?’
She hadn’t. She was matchmaking again, but now wasn’t the time to worry about that, and there are worse people than Barty in a crisis. You don’t have to explain things to him twice. Often you don’t even have to explain them once, because he’s observant.
‘Is that Barty?’ Polly called down the stairs. ‘Barty? You’ll know. Who was the actress in I’ll Cry Tomorrow?’
‘Didn’t know there was one,’ Barty called back. ‘The film star was Susan Hayward.’
Renewed sobbing broke out upstairs. ‘Drinks in Polly’s kitchen,’ I said.
‘Coming right up. For you?’
‘Vodka Martini,’ I said. I’m not a spirit drinker but all in all it seemed the simplest way.
Three hours and at least four drinks later the party was humming along. People were lying to each other at the top of their voices. In the early part of the evening Polly’d soldiered on with ominously sparkling eyes. Latterly, she’d disappeared and I was half-looking for her when I was spotted by Alan Protheroe, who I’d just been working for on the menopause research. I’d seen him already when he arrived with a striking dark-haired teenager, but he was too busy showing her off to bother with me. Now she’d vanished, he was alone, and I was his best friend.
Alan’s an acquaintance from way back, from my early days at the BBC. He’s a conscientious plodder who spotted me as an efficient workhorse early on and helped with my promotion. For two years I’d been his production assistant. He nearly always used my ideas and seldom credited me with them, but it was worth it for the experience. When he went freelance he’d wanted me to go with him but I’d managed to wriggle out of it without hard feelings on either side.
He draped his arm over my shoulder and said, ‘What did you think of Cloudier?’
‘What’s cloudier?’
‘My new PA. That’s her name. C-l-a-u-’
In At The Deep End Page 2
