A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  “I gather that at one time Lydia was trying to urge Maurice towards politics,” said Charlie.

  “Was she? I’m sure you’re right. The boys didn’t tell us things, you see. . . .

  The husband and wife looked at each other, then quickly away.

  “Well,” said Oddie, “she certainly failed in that.”

  “Oh yes,” said Andy. “With Maurice she failed almost entirely. That was the danger, wasn’t it, of working on adolescent minds. They grow up. Talking about it now it seems pathetic rather than wicked, the fact that Lydia had to have relationships with boys rather than men. She couldn’t sustain a relationship of equals. When you come down to it, the relationships after Robert were all with people who were immature.”

  “After Robert?” queried Charlie. “I don’t see anything particularly mature about turning your life into a perpetual boy scouts’ camp.”

  CHAPTER 17

  MAURICE Hoddle walked restlessly up and down the thickly carpeted floor of his office in Midlands Television. The office was a good-sized one, as it needed to be, since it was frequently used for script conferences. It was furnished with the bogus-luxurious anonymity which characterises offices in modern buildings all over the world. Maurice humanised it by untidiness and family snapshots—again, as higher executives of the pleasanter kind did all over the world. Shooting scripts for Waterloo Terrace littered both desk and chairs, and a sad pile of unsolicited manuscripts lay by the wall near the door, as if at need it could be used as a door-stop. The baby was in a silver frame on the desk, but massively enlarged on the wall by the door was Kelly, on her first entrance into the Dog and Whistle in Waterloo Terrace.

  It would have been a restless day for Maurice, even without the imminent arrival of the policemen from Yorkshire. Kelly was auditioning for William and Annette, the prestige series Midlands were filming in France in the New Year. She very much wanted the part, but Maurice wasn’t at all sure she was right for it. On the other hand, as he freely admitted, Kelly continually surprised him, both in life and in her acting range. What was certainly true was that she would be nervous. He had told the policemen that their coming that day was convenient if they wanted to talk to Kelly as well, since she would be at the studios anyway, but in his heart he wondered if she would behave herself. Quicksilver in her changes of mood at the best of times, the audition would make her behavior totally unpredictable. She could do or say anything, act this or that role in her female repertoire. Surprise, continual stimulation, was one of the things about her that had first attracted him. But one thing was certain: when the subject of Lydia came up Kelly would use the word “cow.” She always did.

  Maurice went over to the window to calm his nerves. Looking out over Birmingham always calmed his nerves. It was so pre-eminently the city with nothing. Apart from the fact that Kelly was a child of it, and Waterloo Terrace a celebration of its people, Maurice would miss nothing about Birmingham. He would be happy—if the job came off—to be back in Yorkshire, particularly a Yorkshire without his aunt Lydia. Lydia had always represented an awkwardness for him, in particular an awkwardness with his parents. He never knew how explicitly he ought to acknowledge the harm she had done, the misery she had caused. Both he and they had shied away from the subject—as English people so often do shy away from discussing the most important things in their lives.

  When his secretary showed the policemen in he was relaxed in his welcome. The secretary was instructed to get them all coffee, and while she was setting out cups he studied them both, casting them, as he so often did when he met new people, in soaps. The young black man was easy: he would be a sharp, street-wise hustler in EastEnders. If he couldn’t act he would be no different from most of the “ethnic” actors in EastEnders. But Maurice was pretty sure he would be able to act. Perhaps he was acting now, as a policeman. The older one, Oddie, was harder to cast: a calm, rational, civilised sort of man. Perhaps he would make a suitable husband for one of the older women in Waterloo Terrace. Emily Braithwaite, perhaps, who was currently unattached, having gone through three husbands, in the manner of people who stayed a long time in soaps. He pulled himself back to reality as his secretary left the office. This was a serious matter. He must not go off wool-gathering when he needed all his wits about him. He looked at the older man expectantly.

  “I can imagine your parents will have spoken to you,” Oddie said. “So we can dispense with the preliminaries.”

  “Yes,” said Maurice nodding. “You want to know what I was doing around ten o’clock on the evening Lydia was killed.”

  “Yes, though we’re far from certain that was when she was killed. But can we go back further than that for a start? You went up to see your aunt on Saturday, I believe?”

  Maurice grimaced. Oddie noticed a tightening of the muscles over his whole body, and a tension in the hands resting on the arms of his desk chair.

  “That’s right. It was rather expected of me, though I don’t know why: we hadn’t got any pleasure from each other’s company for a very long time.”

  “You went on your own?”

  “Yes. I thought it would make for less friction. Anyway Kelly would never have come.”

  “They didn’t get on, your aunt and your wife?”

  “Chalk and cheese. They’d only met once, but they both took an instant dislike to each other.”

  “And was there less friction, with you on your own?”

  Maurice had already decided on honesty. Quite probably Lydia had told the boys things hadn’t gone well.

  “No,” he said. “Not really, as it turned out. Somehow or other we rubbed each other up the wrong way.”

  “Any particular reason, sir?”

  “No. Everything just seemed to put us on a wrong footing. Her views on my job, memories of Gavin, the boys she was currently taking under her wing. . . . It may be that it all came back to them. That I saw she was starting to do with them what she had done years ago with Gavin and me.”

  Mike Oddie nodded.

  “Perhaps you could say something, then, about how you regarded your aunt—what your relationship was, then and now.”

  Maurice again grimaced and thought for some seconds. His fingers drummed on the arm-rests, then self-consciously stopped.

  “I suppose from her point of view I was damned ungrateful, as well as being unsatisfactory. And if you were compiling a ledger you would have to enter many things on the plus side: she taught us an awful lot, she enlarged our horizons, gave us a great feeling of our potential—too great for our talents, perhaps. Going up there was exciting, stretching. Gavin always said she was the person who made you feel you could really do something in the world.”

  “He was the one most affected by her, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was still devoted to her, up to the time of his death?”

  Maurice frowned.

  “I suppose so . . . Gavin really enjoyed life, those last few years. He was attached to the Embassy in Washington—young, good-looking, with a glamorous uniform. He was having a whale of a time, and lots of love affairs. But his job was to do with arms sales, so he knew better than most what kind of a war the Falklands thing was going to be. You’ve seen that photograph of him that Lydia and my parents have, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In point of fact I gave Mum and Dad that copy, said he’d meant it for them. . . . But when he sent it, just after the Argentine troops invaded, he wrote: ‘I look at this chap and wonder whether it is me at all.’ ”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “That somehow he’d . . . taken a wrong turning. Got into something that wasn’t really what he wanted to do at all, and wasn’t right for.”

  “Aren’t you reading a lot into it?”

  “Yes . . . I hate to think of Gavin being Lydia’s boy right up to the end.”

  “Did he know he was going to be involved in the war himself?”

  “I think he had a shrewd idea. A day o
r two later he was called back to London, told he was going to be involved in PR and liaison with the press. He phoned me a few days before he sailed. I remember him saying: ‘I don’t see me in this war. I just can’t see what it has to do with me.’ That’s why I’ve always believed that he did get some feeling, before he died, that Lydia’s influence had set him on the wrong path.”

  “Did you say the subject of your brother was one of the things that you and your aunt argued about last Saturday?”

  “He came up. I was foolish to let it. Lydia felt she had some kind of exclusive rights in Gavin.”

  “You began to have doubts about your aunt, didn’t you, a long time before your brother did—if he ever did have them?”

  “Yes, I did. I don’t remember when it was, but I know I was still at school.”

  “Someone in the village suggested it was when you went on holiday with your parents to Portugal,” Charlie put in.

  Maurice turned to him.

  “Do you know, I think that could be right. How closely the whole thing must have been observed! . . . God, that holiday! We resented going, because we’d wanted to go with Lydia to see the Loire Valley castles. Looking back, I think Lydia dangled that prospect before us after she knew that Dad had booked for us all to go to Cascais. It was a deliberate trial of strength. And if she lost that one, I don’t suppose it felt much like that to Mother and Father. We behaved disgustingly. We wouldn’t swim, we said the food was ‘provincial’ . . . God, we were little shits! But then we were pretty horrible to them much of the time—ignored them, put their opinions, their hopes for us in second place, or nowhere at all. . . . And then suddenly—and it could have been on that holiday, because I remember being much happier in the second week—something hit me like a thunderbolt: ‘These are our parents,’ I remember thinking. ‘It’s our mother and father that we’re doing this to.’ I don’t know how or why it happened. . . .”

  “It’s called growing up,” said Oddie.

  “Right. I suppose that was it.” Maurice paused and meditated, putting the course of his own life in order in his mind. “Anyway, that was the beginning of the end of Lydia’s influence over me.”

  “Was it about then that she gave up the idea of grooming you for politics?” Charlie asked.

  “That was rather earlier, as I remember,” said Maurice, his forehead creased. “By the time I . . . grew out of her she had had a series of vague ambitions for me, but they were nothing more than that: she was really taken up with Gavin. She was a one-man woman. But the politics thing illustrates something about Lydia: her plans and hopes bore very little relation to the person she made them for. Gavin could be moulded into the form of a dashing naval hero—though I always felt it was essentially a front, because in spite of his enjoying the Washington social life Gavin was really a loner. And you’re never alone on a ship, are you? But Gavin passed muster, as I say. I was never going to pass muster as a politician. It wasn’t me at all. I didn’t enjoy speaking in public, I had no political convictions one way or the other, and still haven’t, I simply wasn’t outgoing enough. At best I’d have been an uneasy, Edward-Heath-like figure. But Lydia decided the nation needed saving, so I was to be the nation’s saviour. They were essentially plans for herself—for herself through me. It was ridiculous.”

  “Do you think Mrs Perceval had relationships with adolescents rather than men because she wanted to mould them?”

  “Yes. I can say that now, of course. I couldn’t see it at the time.”

  “She liked playing God?”

  “Yes. Even with the marriage to Jamie: people say it came about because she couldn’t get Robert, and I’m sure that’s true, but the other thing was she thought she could mould him. The give and take of really adult relationships wasn’t in her: she had to give, make, others had to take, be made. And she found she couldn’t mould Jamie. I remember her saying once: ‘He was like jelly in my hands.’ That’s the only time I remember her talking about her marriage.”

  “Do you think she continued to love Robert?” Charlie asked.

  Maurice nodded his head.

  “In her way. I’m not sure ‘love’ is the word I’d use. She talked about him a lot, played up what he was doing—because a lot of the treks and endurance feats he went in for didn’t amount to a great deal. She always made sure he had a letter with all the family news when he came through or came out. I don’t suppose he gave a monkey’s fart for family news. He hardly ever came up North, hardly ever visited his parents, I believe. Yes, in a way he was still a hero to Lydia. But she loved Gavin.”

  Oddie decided it was time to bring him back to the present.

  “You say your visit on Saturday wasn’t a happy one, sir.”

  Maurice was glad he had decided on honesty on that point. If Lydia hadn’t said anything about it to the boys, she was pretty sure to have said something to that cleaning lady of hers. He nodded vigorously.

  “Not particularly happy. Let’s say it was tense. You have to remember she ruined my relationship with my parents, and that it’s never quite been repaired. There always is this awkwardness between us, the shadow of my . . . treachery. Actually, having Kelly and Matthew with me made things easier.”

  “Lightened the atmosphere?”

  “More a case of them being a part of my life that has no connection or association with Lydia. Anyway, being with my parents, seeing them afresh as such likeable people, so innocent of wishing harm, meant that I wasn’t disposed to be easy on Aunt Lydia. Meeting her in London or Birmingham was usually less tense.”

  “Did your wife’s view of her add to your feeling that you needn’t be easy on her?”

  “Maybe. Kelly’s very alive to pretensions and small snobberies—of the sort that Lydia mistook for standards.”

  “Perhaps you could tell us what you actually did on the evening of the murder, sir,” said Oddie.

  There was a perceptible relaxation in Maurice.

  “Oh, that’s easy. Of course I’ve thought about it. We were all together, talking and watching television till something after nine. Then Kelly decided to turn in early—we were to be up at six and away by seven thirty the next morning, and she gets tired with the baby. Mum was getting ready for bed, but I thought I’d go and have a drink in The Wheatsheaf, see if any old friends from the village were there.”

  “Did you ask your father to go with you?”

  “Yes, but he preferred a whisky at home, because he had some teaching to look over.”

  “And did you find any of your old friends in The Wheatsheaf?”

  “Nobody of my own age—no old school-friends. Most of them would have left the village, I suppose. But I knew practically everyone there. The Wheatsheaf is where I had my first pint of bitter—with my dad, who was wishing he was having it with Gavin.” He smiled a lopsided smile. “Life has been a bastard to him. Anyway, I was chatting away to Syd Horrocks, who used to be the village butcher, and he was making lubricious allusions to my wife—because Kelly’s visit has been a minor sensation in the village—no, a major one: they’ll be talking about it till the turn of the century. Anyway, after we’d been talking a bit I realised there was this berk down the other end of the bar talking about Lydia.”

  “What time was this?” Charlie asked.

  “Well, say I went to The Wheatsheaf around half past nine—”

  “You didn’t meet Mrs Perceval and the boys on the way there?”

  “No, I didn’t. Of course I’d have stopped for a chat if I had. Well, I suppose I became conscious of this Mr—I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Bellingham.”

  “Right. I became conscious of him say towards ten. After a second or two I remembered who he was.”

  “You’d met him?”

  “Not exactly met. He’d lurched over to our table when we were in the Maple Tree the previous Friday. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him. And of course I listened pretty intently as soon as I did, because the boys had come in while I was at
Lydia’s, and it was—well, quite an experience.”

  “Yourself when young?” Oddie suggested.

  “Exactly—like an old film re-run. Just the situation with me and Gavin in the seventies. Only this time, I gathered, it was the younger one who was the favourite.”

  “Yes—and he seems the one who was most out for what he could get,” said Charlie.

  “Really? But then Lydia was never very good at fathoming people—not people in the flesh. She never understood Gavin—as I tried to explain to her last weekend, to her great offence. Anyway, eventually I went over to this—Bellingham did you say?—and tried to warn him that small doses of Lydia might be good for his boys, but that quite soon she would try to prise them away from their parents, especially as I gathered that his wife was sick and likely to be so for a long while.”

  “We hear you didn’t get through to him.”

  “Ah—you’ve talked to people about it, have you? No—not one millimetre into his thick skull. Room for one idea in his head and that’s all. Eventually I got angry, went back to the other end of the bar, finished my beer and left.”

  “What time did you leave, sir?” Oddie asked.

  “Oh, about twenty past ten. I was back in time for the end of the ITV ten o’clock news—they had a ‘funny’ on as usual: you know, talking goldfish, that kind of thing.”

  “And was your father still up?”

  “Oh yes. We had a bit of a chat, quite cosy together, and we both went up to bed about eleven.”

  “And did you meet anyone in the street on the way home, sir?” Charlie asked.

  “Nobody that I remember. Nobody at all, I think. One or two cars went by. . . .”

  “You don’t remember the makes of any of them?” Charlie asked.