Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Dead or alive?’ I was catching on to this hard-boiled style.

  ‘Dead of course. I’ll give you five to one against finding him alive.’

  Francie would have won both bets if anyone had taken them. The car was found on Saturday parked up a deserted lane twenty miles away, with a length of heavy-duty hose attached to the exhaust and running back through the front window, the necessary chink being expertly filled with a flexible draught-excluder which Mrs Garforth hadn’t missed at the time.

  Mr G was wearing a dark suit for the occasion.

  ‘Extraordinary that the first casualty should be somebody who really is known by an initial.’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ Joan said.

  ‘None of it’s funny,’ Francie said.

  ‘Had you any suspicion?’

  ‘It would be pleasing to reveal that I had staged the whole scene to frighten Mr G into thinking that we were on to him in the hope that he would then confess, which would be the only way of getting a conviction because we didn’t have any evidence. But I have to admit that I thought it was all in a little girl’s imagination. I had not the least suspicion in the world and of course if I had had, I would be feeling even more remorseful about my vain and stupid exhibition than I already am. So it wouldn’t be pleasing at all. What remains an interesting question is what were J’s motives in telling her story the way she did.’

  ‘Well, she must have been frightened of Garforth and thought it was safer to put the blame on Stoyt-Smith, as you said?’

  ‘Yes, I was half-right about that. But why tell the story at all? Did she hope that we would be clever enough to follow the trail that would lead us to the real villain?’

  ‘That’s excessively ingenious surely for a girl of her age and –’

  ‘Education, Joan? Perhaps you’re right, though you might need native cunning rather than O-levels. In any case, if that was her intention, we failed her. Or – no, this is more fantastical still – perhaps she intended to frighten G. But that would be an even more dangerous game. Well, as they say, we shall never know. Perhaps J doesn’t know herself. Should we go to his funeral? No, I think not, it’d be a mawkish gesture, though these days it’s hard to be too mawkish.’

  Mr Garforth had been a late entrant but he had boosted the success rate among people I knew to two out of six and added a new method to those already logged, viz, drowning, hanging, overdose, jumping off a cliff and shooting yourself. Even so, with all these methods available, it was odd that people brought it off so rarely, or did I happen to know people who were below average in practical matters? The idea of doing yourself in might tend to attract the wrong sort, people who weren’t much good with their hands. It was noticeable that the two who had managed it – Mr Garforth and Martin Hardress – had both seemed formidably competent. I didn’t know either of them well enough to tell whether they had anything else in common (being out of work wasn’t at all like fearing imminent exposure and arrest as a paedophile). Perhaps they had shared a bleak view of the world, had both thought that life’s being unfair wasn’t just like travelling on a bumpy road but rather loomed up at you like a dizzying view of the abyss. Better to get it over with under your own steam and not hang about pretending it wasn’t going to happen to you.

  ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet,’ Joan said. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  It took another week to finish off collecting the evidence. Then we settled down to write the report. We had given up our quarters in the school, because term was just starting, and we worked in the hotel, in a little first-floor conference room, not much more than a sitting-room, looking out towards the links and the sea. It was a reassuring time. Setting out the narrative, describing the principal scenes and characters, and the procedures involved – the workings of a case conference, the criteria required for a Place of Safety Order, the current medical debate about the reliability of the physical evidence – all these tasks restored us to a world of calm and logic. The pity was only, as Francie remarked, that this catharsis was not available to most of those involved. He wrote with a beautiful lucid fluency – I am speaking of his handwriting as well as of his thought. The rest of us had scarcely anything to do but check the occasional fact or correct his memory of some minor point in the evidence, but most of this huge body of material he already had stored in his spare bony skull. In the evenings, he drank only mineral water and he made none of his earlier sardonic remarks. By contrast, being largely a spectator, I had time for a huge sadness to sweep over me. Perhaps Joan, and Patricia too, shared something of that feeling. They both seemed subdued.

  When Francie got to the end of each chapter, he handed us copies to read through. ‘It’s like skating,’ he said, ‘I want marks for artistic impression as well as technical merit.’ The evening he gave us the chapter on the social workers to read, I thought I would cheer myself up by ringing Helen.

  ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the report, anyway the draft so far, says you were the pick of the bunch, an admirable witness.’

  ‘I expect you’ll get that bit removed, but thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘Are you all right? You sound – I don’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to let it show.’

  ‘Let what show?’

  ‘Moonman’s gone. Why did I say that, sounds as if he’s dead, almost wish he was, I don’t want to say left me, I suppose, because it sounds so pathetic.’

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘Do you really think so? Don’t you really think, serve her right? I expect you’ll be pleased to hear that he’s gone back to his wife.’

  ‘Of course I’m not pleased. I’ve never even met her.’

  ‘Does that matter? Aren’t you pleased to hear of a sinner repenting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you people believed in marriage being indissoluble, those whom God hath joined and all that.’

  ‘I don’t believe in anything much any more,’ I said, surprising myself a little by saying something that I hadn’t really thought till then. The dragging misery in her voice must have squeezed it out of me.

  ‘Oh I’m so miserable, will you come and see me, I don’t know what to do, I can’t think.’

  Tidying up the report had been quite a business after all, and the light was going by the time I reached the single-track road between the dark fir plantations, so much so that I overshot the cottage again and had to reverse. This time there was no welcome party and there was scarcely a glimmer of light from the squat little house. I had to ring the bell twice before I heard footsteps slopping along the passage.

  She flopped into my arms as though she had tripped and when she stood away from me she was glassy-eyed. Her cheeks were flushed and swollen with crying.

  ‘You look like you’ve been in a fight,’ I said.

  ‘Do I? There isn’t anyone here to fight with, except Beryl and she just buries herself in her homework, just like I would if my mother had gone mad. You need a drink, I do anyway.’

  There wasn’t much left in the bottle and, after we had finished it, she scrabbled around in the cupboard over the sink. All she could find was a bottle of cooking marsala and so we finished that, and I felt sick as well as drunk.

  ‘That’s it for me, you know.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I really loved him, you probably didn’t think so, you probably thought, well, at least he’s not quite such a dead loss as Bobs, who was an obvious mistake, so she’s just cutting her losses or whatever.’

  ‘No, I didn’t think that. I could see that this was, I suppose the real thing is the word.’

  ‘You could see that, could you? Oh Gus, you aren’t quite as thick as I thought.’ And she got up from the other side of the kitchen table and gave me a kiss which was slobbery but touching all the same. ‘Anyway that’s it, there won’t be anything else like that for me, it’s all over, that sort of thing. I’ve just got to look after Beryl. You haven’t seen Beryl yet, have you? She’s long
ing to see you, I’ll get her.’

  ‘Please don’t –’

  But she was already bumping into the chunky kitchen chairs that Moonman had knocked together as she headed towards the stairs calling up at Beryl, who didn’t answer. So Helen climbed the stairs, calling again as she went and still getting no answer. There was only a brief bickering above before she came back down with her daughter now almost as tall as she was, which was not saying much, a serious, slight figure as Helen had been and now wasn’t, not this evening. But Beryl’s hair wasn’t like her mother’s. It was a dull brown, scraped back and tied in a ponytail, so she looked only severe and nothing more. She didn’t have that quality that had caused us all so much trouble, not yet anyway. She greeted me just politely enough not to annoy her mother and then said she had to finish her French homework.

  ‘What’s the point of it all?’ Helen said after Beryl had gone upstairs again, ‘homework, more bloody homework and then you end up like this ditched by a sod like Moonman who doesn’t even leave any drink behind. You know he’s found God, so you’ve got a little friend.’

  ‘I told you I’d stopped all that.’

  ‘Lost one, found one, so He’s all square. At least Moonman hasn’t given his father the satisfaction of crawling back to the C of E.’

  ‘His father’s dead.’

  ‘Makes no difference if you’re Moonman. Doesn’t like the thought of him chortling wherever he is. Anyway becoming a Catholic means his father can’t be anywhere better than Purgatory or have I got that bit muddled?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Tell me, was it awful losing your faith? Did you just wake up one day and discover you’d lost it, like finding you’ve lost a tooth?’

  It was hard to tell whether she was being derisive or trying to be sympathetic, or both at once. In any case, I was annoyed with myself for having referred to the subject at all. If there was one spectacle more dismal than a grown-up person dabbling in that area, it was the same grown-up confessing that he no longer found any of it at all interesting, that the whole idea of belief had suddenly become repellent. Luckily her interest evaporated even faster.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘what shall I do? I can’t stay here. It’s horrible, everything reminds me of him, these ghastly chairs he made, the vegetable patch he dug which only produced these leggy cauliflowers one of which I’m about to inflict on you, the whole self-sufficiency bit.’

  ‘And the doll’s house?’

  ‘The doll’s house is all right. I mean, it’s not all right, it’s sinister, but it’s properly Beryl’s and anyway he made it before.’

  ‘Will you go back to London?’

  ‘Bobs has offered us St Col’s. Well, as you’d expect, he’s offered himself too. One thing the Moonman brothers have in common, they don’t understand that you can’t go back, you can’t love or even half-love the same person twice. So when I said no to that, he said he’d get a place near by so he could come and see Beryl. I don’t much like the sound of that either, but Beryl will like it. There must be something else to drink apart from this horrible stuff.’

  She rummaged in the brown cupboard behind me and dragged out a small aluminium step-ladder. Even standing on the top step she could only just reach the upper cupboard. I looked at her slim legs and her heels arching up out of her slippers and imagined her as I had first seen her, so delicate and severe and in control of the world.

  ‘Ah,’ she gurgled, ‘I never knew these were here. The last people must have left them behind.’

  She came down clasping two bottles of red wine.

  ‘Bulgarian,’ she said, as if it was the most beautiful word there was.

  So we drank them and ate the cauliflower with a watery cheese sauce and then had some more cheese to finish up the wine with and then she said I could fuck her if I liked, which was probably all I had come for because it was all anyone ever came for. So I said it was a bit too late for that in every sense of late and in any case hadn’t she said that the whole point was that you couldn’t go back, you couldn’t love or even half-love the same person twice? To which she said that I was just trying to catch her out, and this was what I really liked doing, which was why I didn’t understand, couldn’t begin to understand what people who were capable of loving other people went through, what they had to endure. So I said that was probably true.

  After I had dossed down on the sofa, she came and lay down quietly beside me for an hour or so and said she was going to be all right.

  Afters

  THE LIGHT WAS shimmery and also somehow pink, not the pink of dawn or even dusk, but rather of some everlasting afternoon, a light for lotus-eaters. The elderly figures on the long benches seemed stunned, suspended in time, as though they had been carefully placed in their haphazard attitudes, some lolling sideways almost recumbent, others lying back with their heads over the top of the bench so their adam’s apples throbbed at the ceiling, some hunched forward with their heads almost between their knees as though about to be sick, but all with this frozen interrupted look, suggesting they had been ordered by the director to simulate the after-effects of a nuclear explosion, or stage a modern-dress re-creation of the last days of Pompeii, so that I felt that at any moment the director might blow a whistle and they would break up and shuffle off to location catering for a cup of tea. Perhaps all this was something to do with the light which flooded down from the high windows in great pinkish-gold shafts flecked with glittering particles of dust, so dense it seemed to be made of some quite other substance, gauze perhaps or jelly, a substance that enveloped, even preserved, the stunned figures stretched out in front of me.

  ‘I love this place,’ breathed Hilary Puttock as he settled himself down beside me, his broad beam forcing me to edge into the corner where gothic protuberances pressed into my kidneys. ‘I think we can just squeeze in the Ambassador.’

  ‘Ambassador?’

  ‘The Strangers Gallery was full. But I squared it with the L.C.’s office. Ah, here he is.’

  A burly bronzed figure, almost as burly and full to bursting with bienséance as Hilary himself, opened the little half-door into the gallery and edged himself along the bench towards us in an eager, buttock-thrusting crouch.

  ‘You know the Ambassador?’

  And, as he turned to flash me a brilliant impatient smile, I did know him. Farid Farhadi seemed hardly changed from the day I had first seen him standing on the steps of the Casino bursting out of his dinner jacket, his restlessness no more contained now than then.

  ‘Of course I remember you perfectly. The nanny. How wonderful,’ he said but only after I had explained who I was. He reached across Hilary and patted my thigh.

  ‘Nanny?’ queried Hilary with a touch of pique, as though suspecting some code he had not been properly briefed on.

  ‘It is all so long ago. What fun we all had,’ Farid sighed.

  ‘Gus has not a little to do with my presence here this afternoon,’ Hilary said. ‘It was he who recommended a certain Mrs Moonman to me. I in turn had the opportunity to introduce her to the Minister responsible for such matters and he was as impressed as I was, bowled over in fact. He complimented her on her evidence to Fincher and said we must on no account omit her from the working party.’

  ‘Party? What party?’ Farid asked.

  ‘On the future of social work.’

  ‘Social work? What fun, what fun.’ Farid was only half-listening, being already occupied in trying to catch someone’s attention with a little finger-fluttering wave.

  ‘From there it was all stations go as you might say. My wife had died some eighteen months earlier and I found solitude not to my taste. At first our contacts were professional as I say but then – well, you know how charming Helen is.’

  ‘Enchanting, enchanting.’

  Farid’s attention had wandered again and I wondered if he remembered what he had whispered into Helen’s ear that evening at the Casino.

  ‘At our age, there was little to be said for d
elay.’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘It was simply a matter of waiting for the divorce to come through. Bobs, I must say, was most remarkably helpful, particularly since he had his own troubles at the time.’

  ‘What troubles?’ I put in, both because I was curious and because I couldn’t bear any further rerun of Hilary’s courtship.

  ‘You didn’t know? I thought you were a good friend of his. His travel business went into voluntary liquidation just before Easter.’

  ‘But surely with the Wall coming down, isn’t everyone going to Eastern Europe now?’

  ‘Indeed they are, but they no longer require the services of a specialist travel agent who possesses the expertise that was once necessary in visa matters, hotel vouchers and the other impedimenta that are now, I am happy to say, a thing of the past. Well, well, there he is. He remains devoted to her, you know.’

  And there leaning over a frail ironwork balcony above us, bathed in a shower of gauzy light, was Bobs, looking paler – that might be the light – but otherwise not much different from when he had first hopped out of the MG outside St Col’s. Perhaps that was the new irony, our peculiar modern destiny, that we didn’t age externally at the same rate as people used to. All the damage was internal now, like fighters who exchange body blows to the point of collapse but with still scarcely a mark on their gleaming skins. Even so, only Bobs could go bust in Eastern Europe in 1989.

  As though answering my thoughts, Farid said: ‘There are wonderful opportunities out there, you know. My friend Dodo Wilmot, you remember Dodo of course you do, he has a lease on half a million square miles of Siberia, gold, diamonds, the kitchen sink. He is having a ball now that he has got rid of those tiresome wives, you know, the women one could never tell apart.’

  ‘Got rid of?’

  ‘Dead, divorced, who knows, both perhaps. Look, your friend is waving to you.’

  Bobs had caught sight of us and was making one of those pointing gestures that American politicians make when they are pretending to recognise someone in the crowd.