Death of a Salesperson

by Robert Barnard

  That, Anne-Marie said, was because they were already going to bed together. Gavin was a man of old-fashioned probity, of deeply conservative principles. He was embarrassed by the situation, and took refuge in taciturnity.

  ‘The strong, silent type?’ inquired Derek satirically.

  ‘Well, yes, he is, rather. Strong, simple emotions.’

  ‘His conservative principles didn’t stop him breaking up my hearth and home, did they?’

  ‘The fire was out, the home was a shell,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘Otherwise I don’t think he ever would have spoken.’

  Gavin apparently was an ex-guardsman, but was now something in the City, as Derek—when he had racked his brains—knew. He was, from all he could learn, just as Anne-Marie described him: simple, passionate, old-fashioned in his morality, strict in his standards. ‘She’d be well-advised not to play around while she’s married to him,’ said one of Derek’s friends in the City. Then, with a sideways glance at Derek, he added: ‘But then, perhaps she won’t want to.’

  Before Derek shunted this particular stock-broker over to his list of ex-friends, he asked casually:

  ‘Jealous, would you say?’

  ‘As a tiger, I’d guess. That’s just an opinion, of course. Until now he’s never had anyone much to be jealous about.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Derek.

  After the separation Derek rebuilt his life, or rather took steps to ensure the smooth continuation of his old life in all essentials. In some respects very little needed to be done. The cleaning lady came in as before, and now and then left him a cold meal, or something that could easily be heated up in the oven. Mostly Derek ate out. The laundryman called, and Derek did a large shop once a fortnight at the local supermarket, just as he had in Anne-Marie’s time. He found a very reliable Algerian couple, students, who would come in to cook for dinner-parties, or do the necessary at any other drinks-and-chat gatherings Derek might arrange. Life went on really very satisfactorily, except that sometimes in the middle of the night he would awake sweating and panting, and sometimes crying out with what he recognized was rage. Luckily there was no one in the house to hear him. He got into the habit, on these disturbing occasions, of going straight to the bathroom and taking a shower. In the mornings he was his usual cool self.

  It was some time before he made any approach to Gavin Hobhouse. To move too quickly would certainly arouse in that conventional, simple soul either distaste or suspicion. It would have, he knew, to be a fortuitous and spontaneous coming together. What in fact happened was that one lunch-time, in a City pub, Derek saw in the glass behind the bar that Gavin was standing by his shoulder in the one o’clock scrum. Derek eased himself round.

  ‘Hello, old chap,’ he said. ‘Too silly that we shouldn’t talk, don’t you think? Let me get you a drink.’

  If Gavin Hobhouse had been what used to be called the injured party, it is likely that he would have rejected this advance. A situation where both men nodded frostily to each other when their paths happened to cross would clearly have been much more to his conventional taste. As the guilty party, however, it would certainly be churlish, not to say un-Christian, to reject the hand of friendship, or at least of reconciliation. He tried to keep the stiffness out of his voice when he said:

  ‘Scotch and water, please.’

  He backed his way out of the scrum, and got them a place by a little ledge on a far wall, and there he waited for Derek and for the inevitable conversation that must ensue without any obvious signs of distaste on his handsome face.

  ‘How is Anne-Marie, anyway,’ said Derek, coming back with the drinks.

  ‘Oh, fine. She’s fine,’ said Gavin Hobhouse.

  ‘Good. Good. You know, though I didn’t think so at the time, I realize now that what happened was obviously the best thing in the long run. Common enough thing to happen, these days, after all—what? Easy to make a mistake in one’s first marriage. Only sensible thing is to cut your losses and get out.’

  It wasn’t at all how Gavin Hobhouse viewed marriage, but in the circumstances he could only murmur, ‘Right.’ Derek, on this first meeting, wisely turned the talk to the current scandals in the banking world, and to the position of the Governor of the Bank of England in them. It was only as they were getting ready to go back to their respective offices that Derek, obliquely, returned to the personal matters that lay between them.

  ‘Ever see anything of Anne-Marie’s mother?’ he asked, buttoning up the jacket of his pinstripe suit.

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. We went up to stay at Penstone a couple of months ago.’

  ‘Wonderful woman,’ said Derek with enthusiasm. ‘A real legend in her own lifetime.’

  Anne-Marie’s mother had had a raffish career, which had begun when she was a member of the Princess Margaret set back in the ’fifties, and which, apart from various flings, had brought her no fewer than four husbands. She was currently Lady Crawley, with a country seat and a national reputation.

  ‘We always got on like a house on fire,’ said Derek, as they threaded their way through the mob of City drinkers. ‘You can see where Anne-Marie got her—charm.’

  That evening, as he sat watching Channel 4 news and forked absent-mindedly into his mouth a shepherd’s pie that his daily had left ready for him, his meditations added spice to the humdrum fare. Clearly he was not going to be able to talk to Gavin Hobhouse too often. Any suspicion that he was waylaying him, cultivating him in any way, would be counter-productive. Conversation between them had to be very occasional, and apparently as fortuitous as that first meeting had been. Derek decided that his first priority must be to find out what Gavin Hobhouse did in his lunch-hour. No doubt he had various haunts—pubs, cafés, restaurants—depending on the dictates of his digestion. He, Derek, went to a variety of places. He was quite willing to add to their number.

  Thus he had waved across the room to Gavin in Alberto’s in Curtin Street a couple of times before, three months after their first meeting, they actually were seated close enough to talk. By a combination of planning and good luck he turned into the little eating place just two minutes after Gavin, and found that the table next to his was the only one vacant. They greeted each other very much as two City gentlemen will, when they have a definite but limited acquaintanceship. They swapped odd remarks about the state of the economy and feeling in the CBI while Derek read the menu and ordered. They discovered (not very surprisingly, since Derek always winkled out Gavin’s opinion first) that they felt pretty much the same about these topics. When Derek saw a couple standing waiting for a table he suggested that he move over to Gavin’s—which was unusual, since he was neither generous by nature nor courteous, except within convention.

  ‘Silly to take up two tables,’ he said, moving his things over. ‘It gets pretty crowded in here.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Gavin, eating, perhaps, a shade faster.

  ‘Used to go to the Coq d’Or at lunch-times—specially if Anne-Marie was up for the day. She loves French cooking, doesn’t she? But either it’s gone downhill, or it’s not somewhere to go on your own. I prefer this place now.’

  ‘Anne-Marie’s more into English cooking at the moment,’ said Gavin, apparently to keep the thing going.

  ‘Really? Really? Not that she wasn’t always perfectly good at the traditional English while we were married . . . I suppose that would be Cousin Simon’s influence, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Couldn’t say. I believe she has had some recipes from him, yes. She’s been talking about a book.’

  ‘Oh, jolly good. I always said she ought to go into the cook-book business. See much of Simon, does she?’

  ‘Oh yes, now and again. He comes over to us, or she goes over to him.’

  ‘They’re practically brother and sister, aren’t they? Naturally, since they were brought up together. I used to think that if mother-in-law hadn’t dumped Anne-Marie on to her sister during one of her grand passions, those two would probably have got married. I like Simon, though, don’t you
?’

  ‘Yes, very much . . . Though I haven’t seen much of him.’

  ‘Some don’t, you know—like him, I mean. It’s that golden boy air he has about him. That look of being the Rupert Brooke de nos jours. That air of playing gentlemanly cricket on the green, taking crumpets at the vicarage, with croquet afterwards in the dusk, that feeling that there must be some elderly novelist somewhere sighing after him and writing him passionate little notes. I always have that feeling about Simon, don’t you?’

  Gavin left a moment’s silence.

  ‘Well, no—I hadn’t thought of him quite like that.’

  ‘Sorry. Was I being too ridiculously fanciful? Well, certainly one thing we never would have predicted for him would be that he would end up owning and running a restaurant, even one as special as the Old Watermill. Awfully useful for Anne-Marie, anyway, if he supplies her with recipes. I’m glad she’s seeing a lot of him. She probably gives him some kind of stable base. I think that’s what he needed during all this racketing around he used to do.’

  ‘Well, er—we’ll hope so.’

  ‘Yes, it is difficult to think of Anne-Marie as a stable base, isn’t it?’ said Derek, with a light-hearted laugh. ‘But I think you may well find that that’s how it works itself out, with those two.’

  He looked guilelessly into Gavin Hobhouse’s face with its faint, bewildered frown.

  Derek was gratified that the next time he and Gavin talked, it was Gavin who made the approach. They were at one of these launching parties for something financial, an early-evening affair to which Gavin had brought Anne-Marie. Derek and his ex-wife kissed and exchanged inanities, and then went their separate ways. Normally Derek would have downed a couple of drinks and then made off, for these were not the sort of functions that anyone but an incurable soak would stay at for long. But almost from the beginning he felt that Gavin’s eyes were on him, whatever their respective positions in the room, and whoever they were talking to. Before long he made an excuse to the incredibly boring City type with whom he had been making incredibly boring conversation, and went over to the table of incredibly boring light refreshments. He was helping himself to a triangle of bread with cream cheese and chopped ham on top when a shadow across the light made him realize that Gavin was at his elbow.

  Gavin, when he did talk about personal matters, came to them at once.

  ‘I say, Derek, I wonder if I could ask you something?’

  ‘Yes, of course, old chap. So long as I’m not bound to silence by company policy . . .’

  ‘Oh, it’s not professional. It’s—well, I wondered if Anne-Marie and Simon saw a lot of each other while you were married.’

  Derek put down his savoury and turned to face Gavin with an expression of great concern on his face.

  ‘Oh, I say, old chap—really, I blame myself for this. No, really. I never dreamed . . . I can see what has happened. I’ve been putting silly ideas into your head.’

  ‘No, it’s just—’

  ‘Yes, I have. I can see it. Well, just don’t think any more about it. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely.’

  ‘Yes, but did she?’

  ‘Yes, of course she did. And she’ll go on seeing him frequently till the end of her days, unless they have some kind of lo—of family tiff. They’re bound up with each other, always have been since they were children. But there’s nothing in it, nothing of the sort that you’ve been imagining.’

  Gavin stood silent for a moment, then muttered:

  ‘She certainly does see a lot of him.’

  ‘Of course she does. But you know what an open-hearted girl she is. When she gives, she gives entirely. I mean, look at her now—’

  He waved his hand to the far corner of the room. Anne-Marie was standing with a man, he stiff-backed and fair-haired, she with her face close to his, for she was short-sighted, looking up intently, laughing at his jokes, giving him the feeling that he was, for that moment, the only man she cared about in the world. Stupid bitch, thought Derek, a spurt of venom seeming to shoot through his veins. You’re bringing it on yourself, you silly tart.

  ‘I mean, look at her. Look at the way she gives her all to anyone she happens to talk to. It’s in the blood. Part of her mother’s technique, if you ask me. But in her case it doesn’t mean anything. She’s giving him the idea that the sun shines out of his anus, but she probably doesn’t know the man from Adam.’

  ‘Actually, that’s Bruno Kohl,’ said Gavin stiffly. ‘Friend of the family.’

  ‘There you are, you see. Friend of the family. But if you just saw them together, in the abstract, so to speak, you’d think—putting the thing bluntly—there was something between them. And with Simon there is the added thing that he is practically a brother to her. Remember how often she was ill in childhood, those long periods when she was laid up with that dicky heart of hers. She relied on him for companionship. It’s not surprising that they got into the habit of depending on one another.’

  ‘No,’ said Gavin, but after a pause.

  ‘So put the thing clean out of your mind. Good Lord, it’s awful to see a happily married chap like you entertaining ideas of that kind. Forget about it entirely.’

  But Gavin, fortunately, could not do that. The thing about people with few, simple ideas is that the ideas tend to take them over entirely. And the fact was that, as far as Gavin’s Victorian ideas about faithfulness and marital exclusivity were concerned, he had violated them by taking Anne-Marie from Derek in the first place. Or Anne-Marie, in particular, had violated them, with his connivance.

  Now Derek and Gavin found that they met fairly frequently at lunch-time. At every meeting Derek noticed with satisfaction fresh care-lines round the eyes, along the forehead. Even the eyes wandered insecurely around the room, and the mouth seemed slacker. Every time they met, the subject of Anne-Marie hung in the air from the first moment, and every time it in the end came up—was brought up by Gavin. For one or two meetings, Derek kept up the notion that he was quite sure there was nothing in Gavin’s suspicions. This was the easier to do because he was in fact sure that, whatever her relations with other men had been, her love for Simon her cousin was child-like and sisterly. Gradually, though, responding to Gavin’s insistent suspicion, he shifted to a new tack, so that before long the suspicion was accepted between them as fact.

  ‘It’s a funny family,’ Derek would say. ‘I yield to no one in my admiration for Lady Crawley. Still, that doesn’t mean I’d want to have been one of her four.’

  Before long that became: ‘You can’t wonder Anne-Marie is as she is.’

  Quite soon Gavin’s watchful eye, ever active at parties, dinners and other social occasions, would detect other men who he was convinced were enjoying Anne-Marie’s favours. He would ring home during the day and be distraught if he found his wife not at home, or would detect suspicious noises if she was there. Derek, on their meetings, would be reassuring.

  ‘I’m sure it’s more a matter of manner, rather than there being anything much going on.’

  Eventually Gavin would cry: ‘Of course there’s something going on. I see how she behaves with these men, don’t I?’

  ‘I didn’t say there was nothing going on. After all, she deceived me with you, didn’t she? I just mean it’s not all that serious. You’ve got to learn to take these things a bit more easily, old man. Be relaxed about the whole thing. Because there’s nothing going to change her now.’

  The last time Gavin and Derek met, Anne-Marie’s promiscuity was by now an established fact for both of them.

  ‘I can see it bothers you, old man,’ said Derek, digging into his sorbet, ‘but you’ve got to face it, we’re living in the twentieth century. All the old standards have gone by the board long ago. And, after all, you’ve still got the major shareholding in her.’

  ‘God!’ said Gavin, spitting the word out.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind betting she still loves you. That’s how you must see it. It’s something in her nature
that makes her as she is, but basically she still loves you, in her way. It wasn’t like that with us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, when we were married and she was playing around—and my God, did she play around!—our marriage was already dead for her. Trouble was, it wasn’t dead for me. Though, God knows, I sometimes wanted her dead. Funny to think back on it now, but I did. Desperately. Thought of going out and picking the good old foxglove leaves . . .’

  ‘Foxglove leaves?’

  ‘Digitalis. Good for the heart in small quantities, fatal for someone like Anne-Marie if she had a hefty dose of it. That was the sort of silly idea I played with, so you can see I’ve been through it too. But in the end you shake down into the situation. Take the line of “least said, soonest mended.” In the end, whatever she gets up to is so much water off a duck’s back. You’ll see, that’s how it will be with you.’

  Derek first knew for sure that that was not how it was to be with Gavin when he heard of Anne-Marie’s death. Ironically, it was her cousin Simon who telephoned him to tell him.

  ‘I suppose it was always in the cards, with that heart of hers,’ Derek said to him. ‘Awful for you—you two were always so close. And I don’t mind telling you, it’s a shock for me too, in spite of it all.’

  That was early on in the morning, about nine, before he took off for the City. Throughout the day there was a trickle of people who had heard, made the connection, and murmured sympathy. Even in the pub that night someone had heard, and the word went round. Derek downed a couple of shorts, then left. There was a lot of sympathy for him in the Saloon Bar: it had hit him hard, they said. When he got home he wondered whether to ring up then. He thought about it for a bit, then decided it would look better if he had slept on it first.

  So in fact it was next morning, after breakfast, when he rang up the police and said:

  ‘Look, I know I’m probably being silly, but you see my ex-wife has died, and quite by chance I was talking to her husband one lunch-time a few days ago—he’s been having trouble with her, as I did—and I made this silly remark about digitalis . . . Yes, digitalis. I’m quite sure there’s nothing in it, but it’s been nagging at me since I heard she’d died, and I find I can’t get it out of my head. What do you think? Should you look into it a bit?’