He sat on, irresolute. Around him the talk had turned back to theater. The landlord, going on his rounds collecting glasses, had paused to listen. Names were being shamelessly dropped by Granville. Pat slipped out of his seat and went toward the door leading to the loos.
As he went through it, the back door to the pub banged shut. He nearly darted over to open it, to see who had gone out, but then he restrained the urge. If it was Cordelia who had just gone out, he thought, she would certainly need time to recover herself emotionally. He stood against the door. To his right was a door marked PRIVATE; that, he knew, led to the landlord’s quarters. To his left was a passageway leading to the ladies’ and gentlemen’s lavatories, and beyond that to the kitchens and the dining room, which also had a more acceptable entrance on the other side of the bar. Ahead of him was the staircase leading to the guests’ bedrooms.
Pat stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. He felt an intruder. There was a notice suspended from the ceiling saying HOTEL GUESTS ONLY. He could hear no sounds of conflict. From a distant room he could hear a transistor radio; that was all. He darted up the stairs and stopped four or five steps from the top. The corridor, with the doors to ten or twelve guest bedrooms, was deserted. Pat had seen Myra’s room key on the table at dinner. It was Room 3. The door with that number on was quite near the head of the stairs. It stared back at him. Behind it, all was quiet—neither voices nor sounds of struggle. Pat sighed with relief. Apparently the fight was over.
When he got back to the bar, the circle around Granville had been augmented. The landlord had sat down, the man from the post office had come over and stood near, and people from other tables were listening in.
“Oh, yes, I’ve acted with Judi Dench,” Granville was saying. “An absolute sweetie.”
Pat looked at his glass of beer. There was only a quarter of an inch left in it. He’d leave them all to it. He slipped toward the Saloon Bar door and out into the twilight. Then he walked toward the Volkswagen, parked around the side.
Granville Ashe was rather enjoying himself. It is true that if he had announced himself in the Saloon Bar of the Red Lion as an actor, he would in any case have been the object of interest and curiosity. That had always been his experience, gained in bars up and down the country. Still, it was certainly also true that being Dame Myra Mason’s husband meant that the interest was sharpened, became more personal. His wide-ranging anecdotes were enjoyed, but someone eventually always brought the conversation back to Myra. If questioned, Granville replied gallantly but unrevealingly and directed the conversation off in another direction. The perfect stage gentleman.
Granville dropped names, but he did not only drop names; he had a fund of theatrical disasters, of coincidences and premonitions, traditions and superstitions. He had just finished Noises Off, itself the story of accumulating theatrical disaster. One or two of his listeners had seen it, and he could direct his stories at them.
“You remember in Act Two, after the business with the axe, when Dottie’s tied my shoelaces together and I sort of hop onstage—of course we’re backstage at this point—well, as I went through the bedroom door . . .”
Granville was a good raconteur. He made the story vivid even to those who hadn’t seen the play.
“And even though the play is about disasters onstage, if you actually have one that isn’t in the script, it has dreadful consequences, because everything is so carefully organized and timed. God knows if anyone in the audience realized it, but there were one or two onstage that were close to heart attacks that night, I can tell you.”
His audience laughed easily. He had put them at ease. Now he was in full flood.
“Plays about the theater are always hell to do. You have to make a distinction between the characters’ theatricality onstage and offstage. I remember once when I was in Trelawny of the Wells at Bristol—”
He was interrupted by a loud report. A sharp, split-second bang. Everyone around the two tables jumped in the air, but Granville was the first to laugh.
“Golly—you should have seen yourselves. Must be some old banger going by. Probably my new stepdaughter and her boyfriend, if what I hear is true. Good that those spoilsports at the Ministry of Transport allow a few old crates on the roads still. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, Trelawny of the Wells. Well, there was this young actress, and between you and me there wasn’t a lot of talent there, or a lot between the ears, and the producer was getting pretty frayed around the edges trying to drum things into her, and the more he went on at this pretty little thing with the tiny brain, the more she turned to jelly, so that before long she was reduced to three or four stock movements, and her voice had become a squeak of panic. Well, two or three of us saw what was happening, and we decided—”
“Excuse me, Mr.—”
He had been interrupted again. It was the woman who had been reading Margaret Drabble. An English gentlewoman—in jumper and skirt, pearls around her neck, and discreetly made up. She seemed painfully shy in this situation, but insistent, as if doing a duty. Granville smiled charmingly.
“Yes?”
“I don’t like to interrupt, but that shot—”
“Oh!” Granville’s face cleared with enlightenment. “That wasn’t a shot. Just an old banger passing down the road.”
“No.” She stuck to her guns. “I was—well, I was in the loo. I’m sure I could hear much better than you in here. It was a shot, and it came from directly over my head.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
“Mr.—er—”
“Ashe.”
“Mr. Ashe, my husband was an architect, and I have a very good sense of the geography of buildings. I’m sure that the room directly above the ladies’ lavatory is your wife’s room.”
Her very shyness made her urgency impressive. The bar was quiet now, and people had come over to listen. Granville looked into the sea of faces. Standing out was Isobel’s—hungry, excited, a little drunk. About all the faces there was a voracious quality that was disturbing. Granville paused, irresolute.
“I’m sure you’re wrong. But perhaps I’d better just go up and see—”
“Please do.”
The scene had taken on the quality of one of those theatrical occasions that Granville had been talking about. He felt surrounded by a tense, watchful, wolfish crowd. He tried to defuse the situation by being conspicuously casual.
“Keep my place,” he said. “I’ll just nip up and poke my head around the door.”
But it was a measure of the woman’s convincingness that as he walked through the door leading into the back part of the Red Lion, they all, quietly, surged toward it. Someone—it was the commodore—held the door open a little so that they could hear. They heard his footsteps, not hurrying, going up the stairs. Straining, they heard him quietly turn the doorknob. Then, after a moment, they heard the click of the light switch.
There was a moment’s silence.
Then they heard his feet running, stumbling down the stairs, and he broke into the bar, his face ashen.
“Get the police! Ring for the police! Myra’s been shot!”
Chapter 10
IN THE POLICE CAR taking her to Cottingham, Cordelia was very quiet. Cottingham was the nearest town of any size, and it was a journey of ten miles or so. Occasionally she looked out at the darkened landscape, now merely a rolling, lowering mass, but mostly she sat silently gazing down at her hands, nervously working in her lap. The fact was, she was ashamed.
The policemen had come straight to the front door of the Rectory and had asked for her by name. Roderick had brought them into the sitting room, and the senior man had introduced himself as Chief Inspector Meredith and the younger one as Sergeant Flood. The inspector had said that he was sorry to have to tell her that her mother was dead, and Cordelia had said, “Dead?” in the manner of second-rate plays—so often a better mirror of life than good ones. The inspector had asked if it was true that Cordelia had been at the Red Lion earlier in t
he evening and then if it was true that she had had a quarrel with her mother. When Cordelia had nodded, unhesitatingly, he had asked her to come over to the station at Cottingham for questioning. Cordelia, who had shown no emotion beyond surprise at the death of her mother, immediately agreed.
Chief Inspector Meredith had also asked her to bring a nightdress and basic toilet requirements. That augured ill, thought Roderick and Caroline, but Cordelia had merely said she would fetch them from the tent. Meredith had not allowed this, nor would he let Roderick or Caroline go and get them. Sergeant Flood had gone down the lawn, and they had all stood around waiting for him to return, in an awkward silence broken only by Meredith’s murmurs of apology. Pat, in pajamas, was with Flood when he came back, but Cordelia was allowed only to kiss him briefly before she was hustled into the police car and driven away.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t do it,” she had called.
No one, at that point, had said anything about murder, but they hadn’t needed to.
Now, speeding in the car toward Cottingham, there was something in the quality of Cordelia’s silence that puzzled Inspector Meredith. He was aware that there was no grief there. Cordelia had pretended to none, and none was perhaps to be expected, from the little he had heard about the relationship from the dead woman’s husband. He had had a very sketchy talk with Granville Ashe while the technical experts and the police doctor had been taking over the Red Lion and getting down to their routine business with the body. But, sitting next to Cordelia in the backseat of the car, Meredith got the odd idea that Cordelia was not thinking about the death of her mother at all. He had had a distinct sense of tension, of something unspoken, between her and the Cotterels, and he wondered if it was that that she was thinking of.
He shook off the idea. He was fancying things.
Soon they came to a landscape of bright shop windows and traffic lights. When they drove up at Cottingham Police Station, Cordelia got out of the car quite naturally and stood waiting for the policemen to escort her into the building. While she stood there, a flashbulb went off. The press—albeit only a local stringer, harbinger of the metropolitan hordes—were already on to the story. Cordelia did not react in any way. She was all too used to being photographed, usually with Myra; throughout her childhood she had gotten used to dressing up for the press men—usually in clothes that suggested she was rather younger than she actually was. Meredith and Flood closed in behind her, and she allowed herself to be shunted gently into the station.
It was an old building, built on to accommodate the increase in crime, or paperwork. She waited, along with a drunk and a distraught mother, while Meredith consulted with the duty sergeant about a vacant interview room. She let them lead her down painted brick corridors to a cheerless, bare room with green-painted walls, one high window, and a table and three chairs. Flood took his chair some way apart, flipped his notebook open to a clean page, and began to take notes. Cordelia took the chair on the side of the table, which left her with her back to the door, and sat down without fuss, looking calmly at Meredith.
“I thought we’d begin tonight, but if you’re tired or confused, just tell me, and we’ll break off,” he said.
Cordelia nodded. He had a nice voice, the slight Welshness giving it a strong hint of music, of remoteness. Altogether he was a reassuring rather than an unsettling presence, for he looked calm, methodical, and unlikely to make mistakes. He was square, stocky, with a kindly face—probably a good father who had played with his children a lot when they were little, watched them at school sports, enjoyed Saturday evenings with his wife in a pub when he was off duty. Cordelia wondered what it was like to have had a good father.
Meredith had taken the chair on the other side of the table. Now he began clearing his throat.
“Let’s get the facts straight first. You agreed you were at the Red Lion in Maudsley earlier this evening and that you went up to the bedroom with your mother and that there you had a quarrel.” Cordelia nodded. “What was the quarrel about?”
“My life,” said Cordelia. Then she pulled herself together. “No, I don’t want to be melodramatic. It’s quite simple. I’ve signed a contract with Maxim’s, the publishers, to write a book about my mother. It will be a survey of her acting career. . . .”
“Yes?” Meredith raised an eyebrow.
“And a more . . . personal section. It was this that caused the trouble. There are—there were—many things in my mother’s life that she didn’t want discussed.”
“But which you intended to discuss?”
“Yes.”
Meredith thought for a moment that Cordelia was going to elaborate on this, but she fell silent.
“A moment ago you said the quarrel was about your life,” Meredith said gently. “Pardon me if I’m putting it insensitively, but is this book a sort of revenge—revenge for the upbringing you had?”
Cordelia gazed ahead thoughtfully, then sighed. “Yes . . . I suppose I would have put it another way myself, but that’s about it.”
“You showed no surprise at the idea that your mother had been murdered—in fact, you assumed it before I told you so.”
“She was the sort of woman whom many people would want to kill.”
“So the thrust of your book about her would have been: marvelous actress, terrible person?”
“Well, that is pretty much the truth about Myra.”
“What is it exactly you have to complain of?”
An air of weariness came over Cordelia. “Neglect, a succession of men, constant abuse and ridicule—”
“Physical brutality?”
“From Myra? Now and then, I suppose. Hairbrush spanking and that sort of thing. That’s not important. That sort of pain doesn’t last. It’s the constant, daily pain for a child of looking to her mother for love and knowing she’s nothing to her—a burden, a reminder, something to jeer at or to cuddle for the cameras if the newsmen come. . . . This isn’t what I was going to put in the book, by the way.”
“No?”
“It would have sounded too much like whining. The reviewers would have said that all theatrical children get neglected, all actors and actresses have giant egos, and most remarkable people have poor-spirited children who resent them. I can just hear what they would say. They would have let Myra off the hook. . . . I was going to go about it in a more subtle way.”
“What way was that?”
Cordelia leaned forward, now really interested, creatively interested, in what she was saying.
“The more I looked at it—having got away from her at last—the more I saw there was a pattern in her emotional life. She would sail into relationships—for selfish reasons, always, for pure sensual gratification or career advancement or whatever—and then find herself horribly encumbered by the consequences, usually because she had no understanding of other people. It was rather comic, really, or could have been told in a comic way. Myra could never bear to be laughed at.”
“You thought making her a comic butt was a better revenge than making her look a monster?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Could you give me an example of her tendency to land herself in the soup?”
Cordelia thought. “Well, there was Louis, her first husband. Louis Leconte. She went into that for pure sexual gratification. Louis was a French diplomat and a complete all-round sensualist. He was also a sadist. That turned out to be one of his main forms of sexual gratification.”
“Was this sadism vented on your mother or on you?”
“On me, first.”
“Was there sexual abuse or just physical brutality?”
“Both. Mother didn’t know about the sexual abuse. Not then.”
“But she knew about the brutality?”
“Yes. She knew.”
“What did she do about it?”
“She sat back and enjoyed it. No, that was unfair. She stood aside. She took up an attitude of conspicuous unconcern. But I suspect now that she rather enjoyed it. Louis went
further than she ever dared to do.”
“I see.” Meredith sighed. He didn’t want to ask the next question. “How old were you?”
“I was eight.”
“How long did this go on?”
“About a year. Eventually, Louis turned the brutality on her. That was inevitable, I suppose, because my mother was intolerable to live with, even for quite nice men, and Louis certainly wasn’t that. She would arrive for performances with cuts and bruises. She had to weigh the sensual side, which was marvelous, or so she has told me over and over again since, against something which she did not like at all. It was quite a struggle for a while, but eventually she saw sense and sent him packing. It was quite the most spectacular of her breakups. Mostly they went quietly, on a wing and a prayer of thanksgiving.”
“Where is this Louis Leconte now?” asked Meredith, his interest quickened.
“In Père Lachaise. One of his later lovers killed him. . . . She got a very light sentence.”
“I see,” said Meredith regretfully.
He thought for a moment, and Cordelia, too, seemed submerged in memory.
“So that was how you were going to treat her, and that was what the row was all about.”
“Yes.”
“Could you have published?”
“Perhaps not. But a book exists, even if it’s not published. You know, like Chatterton’s poetry, or Hopkins’s. I was going to lodge it with a bank.”
“And it could have been published after her death?”
Cordelia saw the trap.
“After her death, and that of most of the other people involved.”
She shot him a smile that said: Don’t take me for a fool. Meredith shifted in his chair.
“Point taken. Now can we get back to this row with your mother?”
“It was she who wanted the row. Or at least she wanted the book idea firmly trodden on, and she couldn’t think of any other way but bullying to accomplish it. I didn’t want any row. I’ve grown away from her. She’s irrelevant to me.”
At Death's Door Page 9
