On the long walk back to my house in Covent Garden I subjected my assumption to detailed scrutiny. Would a man who had just popped a hefty dose of arsenic into my chocolate jug take a first taste of his own chocolate in the form of a massive gulp? I would have thought that, however confident he was of having got the right cup, some primitive form of self-protection would ensure he took a modest sip.
Then again, why would he try to poison me now? The requiem was barely half complete in rough form. If he had waited a few months it could have been in the sort of shape that would mean it could be completed by one of my pupils – the dutiful but uninspired Frank Sussman sprang to mind. Certainly Isaac Pickles couldn’t complete it himself. By poisoning me at this point he was spoiling all his own plans, mad as they were, by killing the goose that was laying the golden egg. If senility was setting in – and I rather thought it was – it was strongly affecting his judgment and his logic and causing him to act in his own worst interests.
Was there an alternative explanation? The chocolate, on days when Mr Pickles intended honouring me with his company, was put outside the drawing room on an occasional table, the jugs protected by their padded cosies. When Pickles arrived the chocolate was brought in by the footman if one was around, or by the Great Man himself if one was not. Either outside the drawing room or once he’d got in, Mr Pickles added a small amount of arsenic to my jug or my cup. His plan was a very small increase in amount so that my death could be timed to coincide with the completion (or the as-near-as-makes-no-difference completion) of the requiem. He was already anxiously scrutinising my appearance and convincing himself I was looking ill, as in the early stages of the operation I must have been.
Someone knew I was switching the jugs or the cups. Someone knew that, after a certain time, the arsenic was going not to me but to the master of the house instead.
Two days after Pickles’s death I received a note from Mr Cazalet ‘written at the request of Mrs Pickles’ expressing the hope that I would continue with the requiem ‘so that it may be ready in the course of time to commemorate the melancholy passing of her husband.’ The note did not say that the old conditions no longer applied and I could compose the remaining movements in the comfort of my own house, so I was entitled to assume that the conditions were still in force. I hoped by returning to Pickles Palace I could be in a position to solve the mysteries of its master’s death.
The eclaircissement was not slow coming. After three hours spent in composing (initial uneasiness being settled by the glorious business of creation) I went to the drawing room to play through the near-complete section of the Kyrie – with occasional contributions from my own fallible voice. As I drew to a close, the far door was opened and the figure of Mrs Pickles wafted towards me.
‘Ah, Mr Mozart. Still gloriously in full flood I’m glad to hear.’
I bowed.
‘You do me too much honour.’
‘The tenor solo you sang yourself reminded me of the soprano solo in the Benedictus. I suppose that is intentional?’
She looked at me as she spoke. I held her gaze.
‘Intentional of course … So you have heard some of my compositions for the requiem already – perhaps from the far door?’
‘Retreating when my husband came down to test the acoustics – yes.’
‘And perhaps at other times taking peeps through the keyhole?’
‘Yes. It’s rather a large one, conveniently. I could not see you at the piano but I had a good view of the little table and chairs. And of course of the tray, with the jugs under the cosies.’
‘I see,’ I said, unusually stuck for words.
‘As soon as I saw your little manoeuvres with the jugs or the cups I knew that my warning had at last got through to you. My husband was in the grip of vast senile fantasies in which he was recognised as a great composer. I feared the logical outcome of these delusions, and of all the silly games he played in the household over the person to whom it was to be a memorial, would have to be your death … But arsenic is a slow-working poison in small doses, and when my husband became your intended victim – because I knew that is what he would have become – I decided to hurry the process up, for reasons I will not go into.’
She looked at me.
‘It has worked very well,’ I said. ‘For both of us.’
‘For both of us indeed,’ she said. ‘I will leave you to your great work. Please remember that if any of this gets out, the first victim of the authorities’ suspicions will be yourself. Farewell, Mr Mozart. We shall doubtless meet when the requiem is performed. You will – what do they call this new trick? – conduct, will you not? I shall play the afflicted widow to the best of my abilities.’
And that was how my involvement with the Pickleses ended. When, four months later, the requiem was performed at St Margaret’s (a church whose vicar went in for the newfangled business of Catholic ritual and costuming) the glorious work was attributed to me, as all would have known in any case, and Mr Pickles’s only look-in was as the ‘commissioner and dedicatee of the requiem who tragically only lived to hear the first-written movements of the score.’ The Princess Victoria was present with her adulterous mother, and though she said she was ‘quite prepared to be bored’ she had insisted on a place from where she could see the Pickles family, those whom I described in my introduction to the performance as ‘his grieving widow and his inconsolable sons’ (one of whom had a racing journal hidden inside his word sheet). I also saw the family, both when I spoke at the beginning and at the end of the performance acknowledging the silent (idiotic English habit in a church) expression of enthusiasm. I saw in one of the walled-off family pews a footman put around Mrs Pickles’s shoulders a capacious black shawl, preparatory to attending her out to her carriage. There was on his thick-necked, rather brutal face something close to a leer.
Eight months after her husband’s death Mrs Pickles was delivered of what was universally accepted to be a daughter of the late Isaac. The London house had been closed up and sold, and Mrs Pickles – in charge of all family affairs until her sons (uncontrollably angry) reached the age of thirty – had moved up north. A year after my last sight of her she had married one of her one-time footmen, now her steward. I hope this time she married for love, though my brief sight of him with her did not suggest it was a wise one.
‘He reminds me of Sir John,’ said the princess with a shiver. She was on the whole a forgiving little thing, but she never was able to reconcile herself to her mother’s lover. I wondered whether, when she came to be our queen, her reign was going to be a lot less fun than most people were expecting.
INCOMPATIBLES
‘My Dad loved fairgrounds,’ I wrote on a day in 1978, my pen pausing, trembling, before nearly every word. I have never believed in modern inventions that allow you to write faster, to erase your mistakes or first attempts, so that they are lost forever, whereas mine can be pored over by scholars and language students for ever in Boston University’s manuscript library of crime fiction, for which I was writing a short account of my life. ‘When the first signs of a fairground being set up appeared on the village green of Ormondskirk, Dad’s nose would start to twitch, and he would begin to chart what rides there were, and how he and I would prioritise which were the best, which were new, which of the competitive stalls – pigeon-shooting, coconut-shying or whatever – would most likely be winnable and whether the prizes they offered (cut-glass ashtray, novelty china bust of Marilyn Monroe) were worth the cost of competing.
‘I don’t know why you bother,’ said my mother, lengthening her vowels to a drawl which she had found fascinating in a long-ago English film. ‘It’s only for children – and only quite young children could be excited by a ride on the dodgems. Philip is well past the fairground stage.’
‘I’m not, Mum.’
‘’Course he’s not, you silly b—’
Dad stopped there. He was always courteous to women, even as he mentally consigned them to an inferior level in his
personal hell. ‘Fairgrounds are for the eternally young – people who can keep within them the magic and mystery of childhood. And people who can dare – can risk the unknown, the dangerous.’
‘I always said you should have been a preacher,’ said my mother. ‘You’d have had them rolling in the aisles, those that were still awake.’
‘Silly bitch,’ said Dad, thinking we couldn’t hear him as he pottered out to the kitchen. ‘Does she think I go along with the garbage the ministers churn out every Sunday? Stuff to give us false hopes and dreams, stuff to keep us in our places?’
‘I don’t know where he gets all those ideas,’ said my mother, who probably thought Karl Marx was an American slapstick comedian. ‘His people were all Methodists. Of course my family were all C of E to a man, or woman, and they tried to persuade me it was never going to work, marriage to him.’
‘Well, whatever it is that’s gone wrong,’ I said, ‘it isn’t because Dad is a Methodist.’
‘It’s because he’s an idiot, living in the past,’ said my mother bitterly.
And she had a point. I was already quite well read, through my habit of digging deep into the school library and the nearest town’s one, and early on I suspected that my father was a creature of the turn of the century, or even earlier. He admired many American writers because he believed that the US was a more democratic and egalitarian country than his own. He would declaim Walt Whitman to me while my mother was out, and he reread all his holdings of Jack London every second year. Of the British writers he liked Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. I had progressed to Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and felt vastly superior to him in sophistication. At the same time, my love for him burgeoned.
Politically my father invariably voted Communist. The Nottingham Oakwood constituency in which we lived managed to field a Communist candidate every election, who generally got about forty-five votes, except at one election when a candidate called George Windsor was standing, and he got about 250 votes from people who thought they were voting for a member of the royal family. My dad had been a Stalinist in the Thirties, fell out of love with his hero at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, then continued to vote Communist into the age of Khrushchev, always protesting it was ‘they’ who had lost faith, not him. He and I had lots of sharp debates on this topic, and I came to the conclusion that his ideal society was closer akin to The Wind in the Willows than to anything in Das Kapital. The two of us nearly came to a breach when I declared myself a Christian, but we came through it.
‘At least you’ve become a Baptist,’ my dad said, ‘not one of these “Tory party at prayer” lot, or someone who believed in the nonsense of infant baptism.’
‘You enrolled me in the Communist Party the day after I was born,’ I said mischievously.
‘That’s quite different,’ said my dad, ‘and you know it.’
My memories of my parents revolved around their high days and holidays. In retrospect I wondered that we could have functioned as a family, but probably at the time – the Fifties – there were thousands of collapsed marriages, mostly ones which as a rule put up a show of unity, such was the pressure to conform. Our family was different, in that we put up no show.
One of the high days I remember was the occasion of my Grandma Dixon’s funeral.
‘Left!’ shouted my mother, when the steering wheel of the family’s Hillman Minx showed signs of turning right. ‘You should have gone left for the ring road, you fool,’ she spat out. ‘We’ll be late.’
‘Just what I wanted,’ replied my dad. ‘Everybody should be late for funerals. Modern society has gone mad on them. You’d think life was so wonderful in the West that the afterlife is bound to be an anticlimax. We’re going to take the country road and arrive agreeably late, pleading a traffic jam.’
‘You’d never hear the last of this if my mother was still alive.’
‘Agreed. But the whole point of the journey is that she’s not. And you’re as pleased as I am that the old bitch is gone.’
This was attested in my memory by so many vitriolic characterisations of the dead woman by her daughter that there was no denial from the passenger seat.
‘At least you’re wearing a black tie,’ said my mother, grudgingly.
‘Ah, so I am. Bought it for old Ken Bradley, CP stalwart, yet lover of all the old habits and traditions. When he went I knew the moment I heard that he would expect a black tie … Good to have a bit more wear out of it, and on a happier occasion.’
‘Hmmm. You call yourself a Communist but you’re really as conservative as the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
And she had a point there too. Christmas was a good example. Christmas always meant a roast chicken for Christmas dinner (eaten at two), though as the Sixties approached it was supplanted by a smallish turkey, which my dad said was ‘the same thing’. Cards were sent to neighbours and friends, people they saw nearly every day, and my dad’s presents to me were kept a closely guarded secret, but one of them was always a book: Isherwood was still publishing then, and a new hardback was a real luxury, though more often it would be a H.G. Wells because his productivity rendered his output inexhaustible. I thought my father was the last man on earth to find Kipps and Mr Polly funny.
For the rest it was crackers, white wine, and port afterwards, the Queen’s broadcast at three o’clock, then a snooze, and then a row about whether my father should do the washing up (he clung to traditional behaviour patterns for the sexes, but usually gave in and, with me, did the gigantic mound of plates and utensils in a gathering atmosphere of grease, grievance and rebellion).
Perhaps surprisingly, Billy Holdsworth was popular in Ormondskirk. He was ‘different’, people said. Then again he knew everyone, and not just their names, but their histories, their tastes and preferences, their emotional lives. Going through the village was for him the passage from friend to friend, and everyone got their bit of his time.
‘Look at him,’ said my mother one day, registering his progress from our large bay window. ‘You wouldn’t think no one can get a word out of him in this house, would you?’
‘We both get plenty of words out of him in this house,’ I said.
‘When he’s in that sort of mood,’ said Mother, not averse to having it both ways.
As our house became for me little more than a base camp, and as university loomed, the situation between my parents changed slightly. The pair that would be left behind (as I had every intention of leaving them behind) constituted themselves as government and opposition, permanently at odds. What was said had to be contradicted and mulled over in debate. The late Fifties were the declining years of the Age of Macmillan, with the old charlatan arousing contrary instincts in Billy and Doreen, as I had started to call them. One day the prime minister was a fine gentleman of the old school for one of them, and a posturer and a liar for the other. The next day the positions would probably be reversed, with my dad’s Communist convictions making not an iota of difference to his stance on anything. ‘Granted that the whole set-up is a tawdry sham that will soon be swept away,’ he would say, before launching into a paean of praise for Macmillan’s landownerly ties with the working man. Doreen liked what she called ‘a clean bill emotionally’ which meant she didn’t like politicians who played around casually, or were popularly reputed to. ‘He’s a man of principle,’ she would say, and fall into a silent fantasy in which she was a glamorous political hostess and he was a young political hopeful. She used that phrase the day the Profumo affair broke. Unfortunately she used it of Mr Profumo himself. ‘He’s a man of principle,’ she said. ‘And look at his beautiful wife. I used to love her when she was in films. Blanche Fury, Kind Hearts and Coronets. You could see her in a coronet. Always the perfect lady …’
‘Toothy upper-class nag,’ said my father. ‘No wonder her poor hubby felt the need to play around a bit.’
By this time I was about to go up to Edinburgh University, for a preliminary interview. ‘It’s nice and far away,’ I said to
my friends, ‘without being the other side of the earth, like Aberdeen.’ My intention was to get a holiday job every vacation so I could cut my stays at home to two or three days three times a year during vacations. My resolution was strengthened by the increasingly deranged arguments at home. Granted that every family in Britain was chewing over the facts and fictions of the Profumo affair, my own family’s chews were particularly trying, since there was no intention of getting to the facts of the matter, merely the emotional need to score points off the other.
‘There’s more in this than meets the eye,’ my dad would say. ‘I expect Macmillan himself is caught up in it.’
‘Macmillan himself!’ Doreen shrilled. ‘You’re up the wall. He’s a man of tremendous integrity.’
‘He’s got about as much integrity as a used car salesman. And then look at his wife, if you can bear to. She’s been having it off for years with a Tory MP. Well-known fact.’
Dad had got that fact from a regular at the Lion & Unicorn, an elderly man who took Private Eye solely to find out who was sleeping with whom.
‘Go on! A woman as ugly as that? You’re off your rocker.’
‘That’s probably what drives Mac to bosomy dolly birds.’
I banged the door on my way out. I had had more than enough of them – eighteen years of it. I was on my way to an interview at the History Department of Edinburgh University, but my parents were too preoccupied with their idiocies to wish me luck.
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