“I expect he has. And I suppose you’re going to add that I have something of the self-love that Mark seems to embody for you.”
“Yes,” said Bettina nodding. “I think I would add that.” She was sitting opposite him now, and she held him with her stare. It was Hughie who spoke.
“We know each other so well, Bettina. There’s hardly a thought of yours I don’t spot in your face as soon as it comes into your mind.”
“Maybe, Hughie…Did I tell you I went and had a look at your current popsy the other day?”
“You didn’t even tell me that you knew about my current popsy.”
“Oh, I knew. Clare is a great one for collecting gossip among the scribbling classes. I hope the popsy is satisfactory?”
“Very, thank you, Bettina,” said Hughie in his primmest voice.
“At least you don’t have to crawl curbs for them.”
Hughie seemed inclined to fire up, but damped himself down.
“But the instinct is the same, you’re implying?”
“The need may often be the same: for reassurance, bolstering of the ego, ministering to your self-satisfaction. And compensating for being shunned by your peers in your early days.”
Hughie, apparently on impulse, pushed aside his plate with a half-eaten cake on it.
“That was lovely, Bettina, but I think I’ve reached my limit as far as cakes are concerned.”
“So have I, I think…It does go back to school, doesn’t it?”
Hughie shook himself.
“Sorry! I was dreaming. What goes back to school? A taste for cakes?”
“The need for reassurance, the need to assert a conventional sexual identity. Both you and Mark were the objects of ridicule and suspicion.”
“But I was ridiculed because I was a Pommie. Quite different from Mark.”
“That was part of it. You tried to become one of the boys by teaching some of them to play soccer. To which, I am quite sure, you were supremely indifferent, and of which I imagine you were almost as ignorant as they were.”
Hughie laughed, and Bettina laughed back.
“But there were other elements,” Bettina went on. “You were the intellectual in a thoroughly anti-intellectual climate. You were called ‘mardarse,’ ‘backdoor merchant,’ and suchlike because that was an assertively heterosexual climate—though some of those loudly hetero men wouldn’t bear too much examination into their feelings, I suspect. But your sexual identity was under challenge, as I suspect Mark’s was at school.”
“Maybe,” said Hughie, shrugging. “And is this, in your analysis, why I’ve usually gone in for bimbos on the side? And why you and I were close as close, but never attracted to each other in that way?”
“Partly, maybe. I think I’ve always gone for fun in my men. You were never fun in that way, Hughie. Wrapped up in yourself, just like Mark and Peter and poor Cecil Cockburn, but in a much more knotted-up way. Perhaps if I’d been interested in taking up a challenge rather than just having a superficial sort of good time we could have made a good couple, or an interesting one.”
“If I didn’t continue to go after bimbos, like Peter.”
“Yes. Eventually I drew the line at that in Peter, so I suppose I would have in you too…Do you remember, Hughie, when we met up again in Venice?”
“Of course. It’s a moment I’ve always treasured.”
“Cecil and I were in that little street, and you were crossing St. Mark’s in the sunlight. You stopped and saw us. We stopped.”
“I just couldn’t believe it could be you.”
“That wasn’t the reason. It was only six or seven years since you’d seen me last. You were uncertain of your reception, though I’d sent a message to you long before by Steve Drayton. It was to say it was nothing to do with what happened at the dance, my having to get away from Bundaroo. Then, in the square, I went up to you and we hugged and kissed. It was so good.”
“Yes. Yes, it was. Golly, is that the time?”
“Hughie, I had a phone call from Murchison before I came away. Katie has died.”
He stopped momentarily in his getting his things together.
“Oh—poor thing! But I suppose in the circumstances—I mean, after what happened to her, perhaps this is for the best.”
“Maybe. It makes things more serious, Hughie.”
He started gathering up his things from the table again.
“Yes, of course it does. I must dash. I promised Marie I’d meet her at the Leighton Gallery at a quarter past. They’ve got a preview of a new exhibition on.”
“Well, you mustn’t disappoint Marie.”
“Bettina—” He had stopped between the table and the path running beside the café. She had not been able to look at him closely during the last minutes of their talk. Now she saw that there was on his face a pleading look—a beseeching call to her to remain compassionate and understanding.
“Bettina, I never meant—” he said.
She should have replied, “Oh, but you did, Hughie. Why else did you malign all my friends, hoping that I’d make you my literary executor?” But she could not break the habit of a near-lifetime.
“I’ll do what I can, Hughie,” she said.
He swallowed hard and hared down the path.
Bettina signed to the waiter for another pot of coffee. She had needed most of the first pot to get through their talk, and now she needed still more. She was glad she had kept a clear head, but reflected that it had not helped her to make a cold, hard decision. That was something she had seldom shirked, except on this.
There was every reason for making one: poor battered Katie calling for revenge (as the doughty old woman would have done, if she had ever regained her voice), justice, the proper fitness of things. And above all her firm conviction that she herself had been the intended victim. The theft or destruction of the tapes of her new book only made sense if she was incapacitated from making a new tape later. The tool which made the botched attempt to suggest a break-in was really meant for that darker purpose and it had been used for it, but on the wrong woman. If Katie had not heard a noise and got up she would have been attacked in bed—Bettina’s bed. And the only one of her close friends who had not been told of her trip to Edinburgh was Hughie.
And all for vanity—all to protect his silly public persona as a latter-day aesthete, a man with a funny accent who lived for Art, from a charge concerning something that happened over sixty years ago.
It all cried out for a different decision, for a strong, determined one that said enough is enough. She knew why, in all those years since Venice, the thing had never been brought out into the open. She knew it because she understood how the decision had been made that Hughie was her burden. It had been made when his strong, farm boy’s arm was around her neck and she had smelled—not beer, as she had told Inspector Blackstone—but the insidious scent of Parma Violet soap. Then she had known she was being raped because it was what Hughie needed, and because he knew she was the only one who would never betray him. Or perhaps she had made the decision farther back than that: when she had seen that solitary figure trudging its way to school in short trousers that were not Australian short trousers, somehow giving off to her alert sense a feeling of helplessness, of being adrift, but at the same time of being excitingly different, instinct with the possibilities that Bundaroo had never till then had. She had never till now seriously questioned that decision. Now she realized it had given him a sense of invulnerability, of being unlike other men, of being one of those who lived by their own rules, made their own moral codes.
And Katie was the one who had suffered. And it was she, Bettina, his protectress, who had been his intended target. Hughie, shuffling off hurriedly, pleading for mercy from her, had been pathetic. But the inner Hughie, the one she had helped to make, was monstrous.
She finished off her coffee and slowly, reluctantly, made her way back to the flat to phone Inspector Murchison. The burden had been borne long enough, God knows. Borne lon
g enough.
About the Author
Robert Barnard’s most recent novel is The Mistress of Alderley. Among his many other books are The Bones in the Attic, A Murder in Mayfair, The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, No Place of Safety, The Bad Samaritan, The Masters of the House, A Scandal in Belgravia, and Out of the Blackout. Scribner released a classic edition of Death of a Mystery Writer in 2002. Winner of the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award as well as Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards, the eight-time Edgar nominee is a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club. In 2003, he was honored with the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. He lives with his wife, Louise, and with pets Jingle and Durdles, in Leeds, England.
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