The Villa Golitsyn

by Read, Piers Paul;

  He turned to look at Helen, almost in a rage. Her eyes were not directed at him, but flickered back and forth as she studied the people on the pavement. He wished he had not said that she could spend the night in his flat, for he now saw how dangerous that was; he opened his mouth to tell her that it was impossible, but then realized that what she had said on the plane was true. She could indeed blackmail him: she alone was a witness to what he had done.

  They reached his small flat in Pimlico. The woman who had cleaned it had come in the day after he had left but appeared not to have been there since. The rooms had that particular smell of London dust: they seemed mean and squalid after the Villa Golitsyn. Simon went into the little kitchen to put on a kettle to make some tea while Helen – still wearing her St Laurent raincoat – sat on his sofa reading the colour supplement to an old edition of the Sunday Times. She too seemed depressed by the dinginess of his dwelling, and this in turn infuriated him: insignificant though she was, he did not want to sink in her estimation from a suave, urbane lover into a pitiable, middle-aged man.

  He took his suitcase into his bedroom and started to unpack his summer clothes. Everything which met his eye – particularly the row of grey, pin-striped suits in his wardrobe – reminded him of his earlier persona and position. Helen, who had gone to make the tea when the kettle had boiled, seemed like part of a concupiscent nightmare of the night before: she should have been gone with the dawn.

  Like a child on the last days of the holidays, Helen expected some sort of treat before going home: they therefore went to a film in the West End, and after that had supper in a restaurant in Chelsea. The others dining there seemed mostly to be off-duty stockbrokers and their girlfriends – fading roses from Surrey and Hampshire – so Simon, at least, felt inconspicuous with Helen; but her very similarity to these other girls in the restaurant, and the continuing banality of her conversation, only emphasized the absence of any real affinity between them. She had ceased to be a neutral embodiment of animal youth and beauty, and was turning before his eyes into the kind of woman her mother must be.

  All this did not prevent him from making love to her that night but it prevented him from enjoying it. He had done it because he had thought it was expected of him on their last night together, and so it appeared had she; for as soon as they had finished she got out of bed and went into the living-room to watch a late-night film on television. When at last she came to bed she slept soundly, but Simon stayed awake, twitching every now and then as he imagined the police hammering at his door. The next morning he put on a grey suit and black tie, and after a hurried breakfast drove Helen to Waterloo to catch a train back to Ascot.

  ‘Are you dressed like that for the funeral?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘It makes you look older.’

  ‘I am older.’

  When they reached the station she said: ‘You can leave me here, if you like. You don’t have to see me off.’

  ‘I want to make sure you don’t get the boat train to Southampton,’ said Simon, ‘and run off to New York.’ He parked the car and took her case from the boot.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, skipping along beside him as they walked into the station. ‘I won’t do a bunk again.’

  ‘Do you feel you can face them?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I feel older too.’

  ‘They may not know who you are.’

  She laughed and ran ahead to buy a magazine.

  ‘If there’s any trouble,’ said Simon as he closed the door to her compartment, ‘you can always ring me – either at the office or at the flat.’

  ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow anyway,’ she said, leaning through the open window, ‘to tell you what happens.’ The train started to move. ‘Oh, and thanks,’ she said – the child remembering her good manners. ‘Thanks for everything.’

  THREE

  There were few mourners at the Ludleys’ funeral in the parish church at Hensfield. The church itself, built no doubt by prosperous wool-merchants in the thirteenth century, was larger than was warranted by the size of the village. What congregation there was had gathered in the pews near to the altar. Simon, who had driven up from London and had lost his way in the country lanes, arrived late. The ceremony had started, so he slipped into a pew near the back of the church, and to distract himself from the tedium of the service he tried to guess from the view of their backs who the others might be.

  There was an old lady wearing a veil and a threadbare but elegant coat, whom he thought to be an old aunt – perhaps their mother’s sister – and there was a tall man in a grey check suit with blond hair curling over his collar whom Simon took to be the land agent for the Hensfield estate. Most of the others had the look of tenant farmers and their wives, or workers from the estate – foresters, gardeners or gamekeepers.

  Only two other men besides Simon were wearing city clothes: one, he thought, might be the cousin who had inherited the house, and the other someone from the firm of solicitors who dealt with the Ludleys’ affairs. They were sitting apart: the first was a thin man in a dark blue suit holding a black coat tightly over his arm. He might also be the village doctor. The second was bulkier and still wore his well-cut, velvet-collared overcoat.

  The vicar spoke well. Neither he nor anyone else in the village had seen the Ludleys for thirteen years, so he limited himself to fond recollections of ‘William and Priscilla’ as children. ‘Of course we would all have preferred them to have lived at home,’ said the old man from the pulpit, ‘but both chose to live and die abroad.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows what drives a man or a woman to do this or that? Only God. What might have seemed to some a dereliction of duty may have been quite the opposite in the eyes of the Almighty. We must judge not that we be not judged.’

  The estate workers and tenant farmers carried the two coffins to the single grave which had been dug next to that of their parents. Simon walked behind with the other mourners. Nothing in their faces told him more than he had inferred from the sight of their backs. He was also distracted from his guessing game by the sight of the open grave, for he remembered how Willy had stood by this very same plot so many years before, watching his father’s body lowered into the ground, then raising his eyes to see the expectant, open mouth and plump, unsmiling lips of his only sister.

  Simon looked up at the sky. Was it the same season, he wondered. The trees now had no leaves, but they were the same trees: the church tower, the telegraph poles, the roofs of the barns beyond the wall to the graveyard – all these would have been the same. He looked down again at the coffins. How he would like to have told them that he had been there, that he had seen the village where they had lived as children; and suddenly, for the first time since they had drowned, Simon was overwhelmed by sadness and wished that they were both still alive. He wanted to say to Willy how ashamed he felt about Helen – ashamed because he had been her first lover without loving her, had debauched her without affection.

  ‘Yet how could I love her when I loved you?’ he asked the first of the two coffins as it was lowered into the ground. ‘I loved you, Priss,’ he repeated soundlessly, mouthing the words on his lips: but then he became confused over which of the two coffins contained her body. The straps went under the second. He wanted to ask but dared not, and inwardly became frantic because no one would ever know which body was above and which below.

  As they walked towards the gate of the churchyard, the man in the grey check suit introduced himself as the Ludleys’ estate agent and invited all the mourners back to Hensfield House for lunch.

  Simon, driving his own car, followed the others down the village and through the open gates into the park. Between the trees, and across the open grassland, he could see a large, symmetrical building which he took to be the Ludleys’ home. It dated, he thought, from the end of the eighteenth century, but when he came closer he could see that it had been maintained in such good condition that it might have been built yeste
rday. Already, from the outside, one could tell that it was no one’s home: the hedges were too well clipped; the lawns too trim. There was no evidence of human habitation, only human pride.

  The inside too was chill – not in a literal sense, because the rooms were well heated against the damp autumn air, but by the cleanliness and order in each of the formal rooms. In the large, impersonal dining-room, three women in aprons stood beside a sideboard ready to serve the mourners with soup, ham, grouse, cold beef and tongue – all of which had been laid out on a white cloth. Their faces showed the kind of shy excitement that a gardener’s wife might feel when called upon to act outside the usual routine of her life. Great trouble had been taken with the food, and there was vastly too much for the few who were there. Simon imagined that the agent had ordered a shooting lunch, and that the staff, dormant for fifteen years, had risen to the occasion as a final obeisance to their dead employer.

  The table was set with twenty places, but only six sat down – the agent and his wife; the thinner of the two men in city suits who had introduced himself as the solicitor responsible for the Ludleys’ affairs; the old lady, who was indeed an aunt – a sister of their mother; Simon; and the second man in a city suit, who smiled at Simon as if he knew him from beneath thick, ill-kempt eyebrows.

  ‘Is that the cousin who will inherit the house?’ Simon asked the solicitor, nodding towards this, the last of the unidentified mourners.

  ‘Tristram Bailey-Jones?’ the solicitor replied. ‘No, no, alas, he wanted to come but he couldn’t get away. He’s something in the City, you know. Always flying off to the Middle East.’

  The aunt, who sat on Simon’s other side, suddenly turned to him and asked: ‘Are you the one who was there?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In France. Where they drowned.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.

  ‘They were out on their boat with another friend, Charlie Hope. There was a tidal wave.’

  ‘In the Mediterranean? A tidal wave?’

  Simon explained about the building of the new port.

  ‘But wasn’t it a funny time to take a holiday?’ the aunt asked.

  ‘They weren’t on holiday,’ said Simon. ‘They – that is Willy – lived there.’

  ‘In Nice? I thought he lived in Brazil.’

  ‘He used to live in Argentina but he had settled in Nice.’

  ‘And she lived in Africa, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. In Morocco.’

  She sighed. ‘I never understood why they didn’t live in England.’

  ‘I think it was the tax,’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old lady sharply. ‘That would account for Will living abroad, but Priscilla had no money of her own. None to speak of, anyway. She could have lived in England.’

  ‘The light,’ said Simon. ‘She liked the light in Morocco – for her painting.’

  They moved through to the drawing-room, where they drank coffee – some sitting, some standing around a great log fire. Simon, as the only one there who had known the Ludleys in their later years, was cross-questioned by the agent’s wife and then trapped by the solicitor, who while unctuously thanking him for the trouble he had saved him in Nice, also tried to discover the amount of money they should expect from the sale of the Villa Golitsyn.

  As soon as he had finished his coffee, Simon took his leave. He was accompanied to the door by the agent, and the thickset man with the bushy eyebrows left the house at the same time. They walked across the gravel towards their cars and this fellow-guest, who now wore his velvet-collared overcoat, asked Simon if he would like a lift back to London.

  He asked in a bluff, familiar way – speaking with the touch of a northern accent – and Simon was surprised at the question, since the man must surely know that he had a car of his own. He turned and declined the offer, noticing as he did so in the bright, horizontal light of the winter sun the red hair mixed with grey.

  ‘You’re Milson, aren’t you?’ the man said as he pulled on a pair of leather gloves.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Baldwin, Leslie Baldwin. We work for the same firm.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon.

  ‘So did Ludley, of course. That’s where I knew him.’

  ‘In Djakarta,’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s right.’ The man’s jovial face turned hard for a moment. ‘So you know about me?’ he said.

  Simon blushed in confusion. ‘Well Willy mentioned that you’d been with him in Djakarta.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  Simon hesitated. He tried to remember what it was that Willy had said about Baldwin but could only remember ‘Les Miserables’. He hesitated, then smiled at Baldwin, opened his mouth to speak but could think of nothing to say.

  Baldwin’s face took on the hard expression it had worn a moment before. ‘Never mind what he said,’ he said sharply, taking his gloved hand out of his pocket and reaching inside his coat. ‘I know why you went out there, and I dare say you have come back somewhat better informed. But before you go to see Fowler, you had better look at these.’

  He took a brown envelope from his inside pocket and handed it to Simon. It was not sealed, and for a moment Simon thought it contained money, but when he reached inside he found a collection of photographs, almost all of himself with Helen. They had been arranged in sequence. The first showed them arriving at the station in Nice, Helen still wearing her school uniform. There were then several on the Promenade des Anglais, and others on the beach. One or two had been taken at Sospel, where they had stopped on their way to the chapel in the mountains, and all had the grainy texture of pictures taken with a telephoto lens. The last in the series were more than a dozen blurred but unmistakable photographs of the two of them naked in the Ludleys’ bedroom – including one of Helen wearing only a poodle’s collar, drinking from the saucer of champagne.

  Simon stood there stunned, unable to understand how anyone could have taken such photographs, but then he remembered the block of flats between the house and the sea – Les Grands Cèdres – and the window opening out onto the balcony of the Villa Golitsyn.

  ‘You know she’s under age, don’t you?’ said Baldwin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon sourly. He looked down at the photographs again. In one of those taken on the beach, Priss sat next to Helen: she seeming to be staring at him, a slight smile on her face.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Baldwin in a dispassionate tone of voice. ‘I find it distasteful, but my friends are quite convinced that every Englishman has his sexual perversion and in your case, I’m afraid, it turned out to be true.’

  ‘What do you intend to do?’ Simon asked.

  ‘We don’t know what Ludley told you,’ said Baldwin, ‘but we know why Fowler sent you out there and have no reason to suppose that you didn’t get what you wanted.’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t spoken to Fowler already?’

  ‘Because you haven’t been to the office, and Fowler doesn’t believe in the telephone.’

  ‘These photographs,’ said Simon, ‘are better proof than anything Willy may have said …’

  ‘But you won’t show them to Fowler, will you?’ said Baldwin. ‘I’m afraid they know you, Milson – not personally, perhaps, but they know your type. You don’t really care who wins the cold war or runs this country.’

  Simon opened his mouth to protest, but Baldwin interrupted him. ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you are as you are, because people like you make it easier for people like me. We can always count on you to take the path of least resistance.’

  He laughed – the empty laugh of a man with no sense of humour.

  ‘Why are you so sure that I won’t tell Fowler everything that you’ve told me?’

  ‘Because I know you’re not a fool. Remember that whatever Ludley may have told you, and you may tell Fowler, they’ll never be able to prove anything against me. The worst they can do is shun
t me off into some cosy little embassy. It won’t be quite what I wanted, but I’ll be rather more comfortable in Copenhagen or Vienna than you will be in Wormwood Scrubs.’

  Simon said nothing: he looked down at the toes of his shoes and kicked the gravel.

  ‘No need to answer me now,’ said Baldwin. ‘If I don’t go to Washington, I’ll know why – and the snaps, I’m afraid, will go to the police and Private Eye.’ Baldwin got into his car. ‘Keep the prints,’ he said. ‘The negatives will do me. Show them to your little friend. They might even turn her on.’ He laughed. ‘We won’t meet again,’ he said. ‘I’ll know what you’ve decided by what happens to me.’

  FOUR

  It was sleeting as Simon drove back to London. The half-formed flakes of snow landed on his windscreen as a constellation of crystals and then were either swept away by the monotonous movements of the wipers, or melted into small drops of water and trickled down the glass.

  Simon drove with scrupulous care, fighting an impulse to drive headlong into a car or lorry coming in the opposite direction. Never in his life before had he felt so desolate – abandoned by everyone who had ever loved him, and now faced with the choice of betraying his country or ruining himself.

  Behind this overwhelming misery his thoughts darted around like eels in stagnant water, searching for some channel to escape. Only one seemed clear – to give in to blackmail, to tell Fowler that Willy had confessed his treason before he died. It was simple and safe: no one could ever refute him. Even if Baldwin was discovered later in his career, that would only signify that perhaps both had been traitors. Nothing could ever be proved against Simon.