‘That’s a good idea. There was something about confronting your fears in the Style section of The Sunday Times this week.’
‘Who do I get advice from? A therapist? A Buddhist monk?’
‘Darling, I’ll give you the name of my spiritual healer.’ Jane chews her spinach salad very thoroughly. A society woman once told her that the way to ensure none of it gets stuck in your teeth is to chew very energetically, moving your mouth when it is closed in such a way that your lips rub against your gums like windscreen wipers and sweep the spinach away.
‘Really, you’ve got a spiritual healer? I didn’t know you had any spirituality at all.’
‘Well, it’s more of a networking thing, but I can get you in. He’s very good, I think. His glasses are exactly the same shape as the Dalai Lama’s, which gives him tremendous credibility and creates an atmosphere of trust and sharing at the meetings.’
‘I don’t think I want someone who’s very good, after all. Someone told me once that if you need advice, you shouldn’t necessarily ask a successful person. You learn more from failure.’
‘That’s a very good point. I did this fantastic feature about diets, once, with quite a lot of input from my friend Alvin who has to be very careful with his weight. If you want to know about diets, you should ask a fat person. They can evaluate every single kind of diet around – low fat, high carbohydrate, high protein, cabbage soup – you name it.’
‘I think I’m looking for a broken person.’
‘Broken people are terribly depressing. If I can find you someone living successfully without a name or identity, would that help?’
‘I suppose so. Jane, why do you like getting involved in my life?’
‘It’s a nurturing thing, Harvs.’
Alison is reading to Phoebe. They are sitting on Alison’s bed. Taron is in the garden smoking a cigarette, watching them through the open French windows. Phoebe’s eyes are fixed on Alison’s face, watching her mouth move as she reads the words in the picture book.
‘ “The lion is floating down the river on a raft” Why do you think he’s doing that, Phoebe?’
‘Is he looking for his friends?’ asks Taron.
‘Is he? Is that why he was building a raft?’
‘Well, I think he was miserable all the time and he stopped going out so his friends gave up on him and ran away.’
‘Really? I didn’t get that at all. Anyway the monkeys stayed around. They were the ones who helped him build the raft. Phoebe, come back.’
‘I don’t think much of this book. Can you read Melisande next time, about the Princess whose hair grows and grows?’
‘Do you think it’s suitable?’
‘Oh yes. It’s my favourite story. Are you coming out tonight?’
‘I can’t leave Phoebe.’
‘I could get you a babysitter.’
‘Next time.’
Chapter Nine ~ The White Van
Roy has explored and mapped Paradise, from the horse shoe seashore as far as the sign on the fence. He has cleared a small area near Sylvia’s vegetable patch and built a scale model of her house using pebbles, shingle and driftwood. It’s a task he started merely to pass the time but the accuracy of its execution has since become important to him.
Roy is a practical man and he’s used to being busy. He was in charge of the maintenance of the buildings at Mrs Latimer’s. He carried business cards with ‘Facilities Manager’ printed on it but he thought of himself as a handyman. Everywhere he went, he carried with him a battery-operated reversible screwdriver, a tape-measure, a pen and a walkie-talkie. It was second nature to him to detach the radio from his belt every fifteen or twenty minutes, bring it up to his mouth, depress the switch and issue orders or ask questions of his staff over the air.
It takes some adjustment not to stop where he is standing and expect to connect to Sylvia to ask an important question ‘Why is there a fence in Paradise? Over,’ pressing the receiver to his ear to try to discern the reply over the hiss and crackle. There are no walkie-talkies in Heaven. By the time he has walked all the way back to where Sylvia is working, the importance of the question usually diminishes to the point where he seldom asks her anything except whether she would like a cup of tea.
Walking back to the house one day, counting the paces from the farthest edge of the shore, Roy sees a white van speeding along the path away from the house. He stops still in astonishment at the first sight of an outsider in Paradise. Then he breaks into a run, waving. Standing still and waving is fairly straightforward but running and waving is more difficult, the waving slows him down. The dust thrown up around the disappearing white van disguises the wheels, giving it an other-worldly appearance, as if it is being transported everywhere on a cloud.
The van disappears, unheeding his stumbling, waving attempts to communicate with it. Roy is frightened and excited by the sight of the van, wondering what it portends. Perhaps it has been dropping off another of Sylvia’s animal friends, newly demised and recently arrived from Earth? Perhaps it was collecting something? Roy decides to rush back to the house but then to say nothing, giving Sylvia the opportunity to explain in her own time, in case it’s something sensitive.
She’s sitting in the kitchen eating chocolate, day-dreaming. The suspense is too much for Roy. ‘I saw the van.’
‘Yes. Deliveries.’ When Sylvia eats chocolate she sucks each piece until it dissolves, rather than chewing it. Apparently it is not so fattening if you eat it that way.
‘Delivering what?’ Is Sheila here? Another elephant? His friend Brian Donald? A whole host of performing dogs?
‘Delivering provisions. We were running out of things to eat, Roy.’ She gets up very slowly from the kitchen table and switches on the kettle. ‘And some paperwork I’ve been expecting.’ She waves a brown envelope. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
Roy is shocked and frightened by the emotions stirred by the possibility of the death of his friends and loved ones. Death is usually associated with loss but in this case it would involve a gain of some kind. In fact he’d be gaining more than he could cope with, if faced with the arrival of Brian Donald or Sheila or Sylvia’s animal friends. But he’d like to see Sheila again. The thought makes his head spin. What would happen if Heaven and Earth met somehow?
Roy thinks about Sheila, so far away and impossible to reach. What is Sheila doing now? Is she weeping and helpless with grief, or is she coping as always, briskly getting on with things, organising volunteers for the next hospital fundraising day?
Roy walks outside to his scale model of Paradise, removing a few of the faded blossoms and leaves that have blown onto it from Sylvia’s flower beds, adjusting the angle of the twig fence, raking the earth with his hands. Then he walks off to the seashore, carefully pacing the distance.
Chapter Ten ~ Convenience
Sheila goes to the newsagent in Brixton Hill to buy a one-day Travelcard. The people who own the shop stand a foot higher than their customers on a platform behind the counter, smiling with infinite good humor. Theirs is the only local convenience store for a radius of two miles in which the people serving in the shop are prepared to engage in eye contact with the customers during any transaction. In every other shop, the young men who work there talk incessantly on mobile phones, punching the price of the shopping into the till with a very off-hand manner, as if the work is beneath them, which it may very well be, as they all drive expensive jeeps which they park outside and watch jealously through the windows.
Sheila takes a bus from outside the newsagent’s to Clapham Junction and then takes a train on the West Sussex line to Mrs Latimer’s house, as Roy used to do on the days when he worked there, cheating one of the disadvantages of living in London by taking a twenty-five minute journey against the commuter traffic.
Venetia Latimer, wary but sympathetic, receives her missing employee’s wife with kindness and a cup of tea in the kitchen. She has had a little while to prepare for the meeting as Sheila’s worried fa
ce showed up on the closed circuit TV system when she first entered the land surrounding the estate and it tracked her progress until she reached the kitchen, at the heart of Mrs Latimer’s empire.
‘I think he’s alive.’ Sheila tells Mrs Latimer. ‘But I don’t understand why he hasn’t found his way back. If he were free, he’d find his way back home to me.’
Mrs Latimer understands. Sheila is talking about love. Mrs Latimer sympathizes enormously but there is nothing she can say to make Sheila feel better. There is never anything anyone can say in these circumstances. Everyone is unreachable in their own private hell. Perhaps Roy has run away and left Sheila. She’ll come to terms with it in her own way in the end.
‘I was wondering whether you could shed any light on his disappearance, Mrs Latimer?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Mrs Latimer is jarred out of her reverie on the pain of abandonment.
‘Is there any reason, any business reason, why someone should keep Roy from coming home?’
Mrs Latimer stares, astonished. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘You have a very successful business empire, Mrs Latimer. Roy was a part of it. A small part of it. I know he worked here for less than a year but even so, I wondered if there was anyone who could have kidnapped him?’
‘I’m sorry? I thought he, um, blew away.’
‘He may have fallen into the hands of your enemies. I wondered if they would try to obtain your secrets from him. The training techniques for the performing dogs, for example.’
‘But my dear, why would they have waited until he, er, blew away, to obtain this information from him? It doesn’t make sense.’ Mrs Latimer watches as Sheila’s face collapses in pain. ‘I’m sorry, I wish I could help you.’
‘It’s OK, I’m not working alone. I’ve hired a private detective to help me. She was very helpful and very supportive. “Only believe.” ’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Mrs Fitzgerald said to me: “You’ll find him. Only believe.”
‘Only believe? Well, then, there is something I can do. I’ll pay the detective’s fees. As Roy worked for me, it’s the least I can do. You can handle all the contact, I don’t need to be involved at all. Just send me the invoices for the next three months and a copy of the reports she makes and I’ll pay all reasonable expenses. If we haven’t found Roy in three months then perhaps we should talk again. But we will, Sheila. Love will find a way. He’ll be back with you in no time and we’ll all be laughing about it at the Christmas party. Just some silly misunderstanding.’
Sheila’s visit has put Mrs Latimer in a thoughtful mood. A little while after Sheila has gone she takes her credit card from her purse and telephones The Times newspaper. She asks the sales assistant at the other end of the telephone to place an advertisement on her behalf in the personal column two days later, on the anniversary of the death of the great Poodles Hanneford:
“It doesn’t matter about the money. Please come back. V.”
‘Is that it?’ asks the assistant.
‘It’s enough,’ says Venetia.
She walks into her study and opens a drawer in her desk. She takes out a faded report into the care of performing animals entitled ‘Unkindness Kills.’ The report deals with animals trained for film, television and circuses and those kept in zoos. It argues that teaching animals to perform is unethical. The author cites proven instances of cruelty by trainers and keepers. It lists the names of horses killed in steeple chases. Mrs Latimer flips it over and re-reads the familiar summary: ‘If every person who reads this report refuses to approve of performing animals, withdraws their support, refuses to participate even as a spectator, this will wither the industry. There is no need to campaign or protest. Just walk away. The industry cannot survive without an audience. Only believe.’ And then the initials at the bottom, ‘E.F.’.
Harvey is wiggling his hips to the tunes from Jane’s Live at Pride CD as he inspects her fridge for something that isn’t low fat to pick at over coffee.
‘Harvey,’ Jane growls as his hand falls on a stale donut, ‘stop mincing around and coin a clever phrase for me that I can slip into this style piece I’m doing for The Sunday Times.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about how you can fit a beauty routine into your busy day as a housewife and mother. You just make face masks out of the kids’ food.’
‘Messy Mums?’
‘Nah, too negative.’
‘Stale donut?’
‘Hmm, doesn’t really make sense. Stale Donut. Messy Mum. Donut Mum. It still all sounds vaguely insulting. And it’s not exactly Generation X or the Beat Generation.’
‘Jane, honey, what are you talking about? I was asking if you wanted to share a piece of this donut with me. Still, if you’re looking for a metaphor in your article how about Donut Generation? Does that sound better? Sugary and yummy-looking on the outside, an empty space on the inside.’
‘Harvey, you’ve cracked it. That’s absolutely great. It’s too good to restrict it to an article about mango face packs. I’ll develop it and pitch it somewhere. Jane Memory writes wittily and pithily about the Donut Generation. Jane points out that we all look delicious but we are empty inside. Men purr, women purr, the standard of the literary style piece is raised to new heights, editors pay vast amounts of money. Stop pirouetting, Harvey.’
‘I wasn’t pirouetting.’
‘There’s a tea towel over there if you need to wipe the sugar off your trousers. I need to raise my profile in print journalism, and I’d like to get into TV.’ It is six months since Jane Memory gave her cold heart to TV docu-soap director Philippe Noir but so far he has failed to respond with a job offer. It is a sore point. ‘I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved in journalism but I want to go further. I’m terrified I’m not going to get the breaks.’
‘Terrified? What do you fear most in the world, Jane?’
‘Obscurity. At least it’s easier to fix than a fear of the unknown.’
Harvey watches Jane scratching her coccyx with the blunt end of a ballpoint pen through her trousers. ‘Jane, what color is “oyster”, would you say?’
‘Red, orange, yellow … gained battle in vain… green, blue, indigo, violet. It isn’t a color at all.’
‘When I was a student at art school I worked weekends in the carpet department of a large furniture store. I handled telephone complaints. “They’ve delivered the wrong color carpet,” customers would say. “I ordered oyster but this is too dark, it doesn’t look oyster-colored at all. This is more of a gun-metal gray.” Or dove gray or slate gray. “But that’s the carpet you chose from the sample you saw in the show room,” I’d tell them, “oyster is just a label we use.” It happened all the time. Doesn’t that surprise you? People expected the carpet to match the color that the name painted in their head, rather than matching the sample they’d chosen with their own eyes. They would actually call me up and argue about the name we gave to the color.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me at all Harv, people will do anything to get a discount.’
Mrs Fitzgerald sits on the top deck of a 159 bus as it waits at traffic lights at the square roundabout formed by Parliament Square in Westminster. The bus is in the one of the three lanes of traffic that is nearest to the Houses of Parliament. Mrs Fitzgerald looks down and to her right, where a policeman in a box with a pointed roof guards the entrance to the House of Commons car park.
Mrs Fitzgerald looks at the statue of the crusader king Richard I, Coeur de Lion, riding his horse in front of the Houses of Parliament, his rapier sword raised in his right hand. He never did much for this country, plundering the gold reserves to pay for his wars against the Muslims (or Infidels, as they were known then). However he cut a very dashing figure, and his aggressive foreign policy did no harm to his popularity at home.
A young man on the path catches Mrs Fitzgerald’s eye as the bus moves off slowly to the left. He is swinging his arms, taking long strides. The hem of his summer cotton dr
ess brushes his knees as he walks. Mrs Fitzgerald turns completely around in her seat, rising up a little to catch a further sight of him but he has disappeared. If he was even there in the first place. She stares back through the rear window of the bus at Big Ben for a while, its façade familiar and reassuring, as the bus passes by Downing Street and Horse Guards Parade on its way up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square.
Big Ben is the name popularly given to the Gothic clock tower which stands 316 ft high at the north side of the Houses of Parliament, although that is properly the name of the biggest bell in the tower that chimes the Westminster chimes on the hour, every hour. The bell weighs 13½ tons, cast in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1858. Some sources say the bell was named after Sir Benjamin Hall who commissioned the building. Others, perhaps given its East End provenance, suggest the bell was named after boxing champion Big Ben Caul who went sixty rounds unbeaten.
Each of the four clock faces are 22½ ft in diameter. The individual numerals are nearly two ft tall. The minute hands are 14 ft long. Each one will have traced an arc of more than five feet in the five minutes since Mrs Fitzgerald first saw Jeremy making his way towards the clock tower.
Venetia Latimer looks at the kitchen clock. 11.30 p.m. She is worried about her husband. She has left him sitting in the next room, his elbows propped on the worn arms of his chair, his head held in his hands as if it has grown too heavy to be supported by his neck. What use are you? she thinks, not unkindly. He’s worrying about his job, she can tell. His new boss is giving him a hard time.
There is no point any longer in being a businessman, a technician or a tradesman, if you are a man. Women can learn the skills and perform those jobs as well as any man, or better, apparently, in the case of her husband’s new boss.
A man who joins a large company is provided with a pension plan, a swipe card to get in through the front door and a bushel so he can hide his light under it. It certainly isn’t the kind of work Mrs Latimer would have chosen for her son. She would rather he was a showman – a circus performer or an actor. Venetia suspects that men will be valued in the future only so long as they are frivolous; exotically and notably different from women.
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 68
