by Joseph Hone
‘Selling it, are you?’ Willis had found some of his natural gusto once more. ‘I’m finishing this year, too. Thought of a place back in London. Might you consider selling it to me?’
‘Oh, Willis, it’d be miles too big for you.’ Madeleine was dismissive. ‘It’s a ridiculous idea. What would you do there?’ She laughed.
Willis’s face fell then, became meek and unhappy just for an instant, as though he had been some pet animal unjustly reprimanded. But he recovered at once. ‘I’d put it into flats. Give me an income. Besides, I’ve always been very fond of the place. You remember those children’s parties your parents gave – the lemon water ices? That Italian they had every year, complete with his little ice cream cart and straw boater, serving them out in the hall?’
‘Yes! I do remember.’ Madeleine was radiant now. The moment’s unease I’d felt between them had gone. ‘Giovanni something – with a droopy moustache, just like my Crimean grandfather. That portrait –’
‘Yes, the one in the billiard-room – with the others: that row of marvellous Victorian gallants on each side of the room.’
The two of them shared their happy reminiscences with vigour. Their early relationship appeared uncannily like my own with Rachel, I thought – twenty-five years later in the same house. And the result, too, seemed to have been identical: Willis and I had both lost out to the same man – Lindsay again. Wherever either of us had turned, in these two generations of the same family, Lindsay was always there, waiting to pre-empt our happy destiny. And I was annoyed once more at Lindsay then, so that when a lull came in their memories I took the opportunity of mentioning something possibly embarrassing or even discreditable about him.
‘I found a book stuffed down the back of a shelf in Glenalyth the other day,’ I said innocently. ‘A diary – about Dollfuss and the civil war in Vienna in 1934 – written by some Austrian woman called Maria von Karlinberg. A “comrade’s” diary. I wondered if you’d ever heard of her, Willis, when you were out there with Lindsay?’
Willis paused, his fork half-way to his mouth. He put it down and drank some wine instead. Then, having given himself time to think, he said, ‘Yes – I do remember her. At Legation receptions in the Metternichstrasse. We had to ask her. She was a very rich and well-connected woman, turned socialist, worked as a reporter on one of the Red papers they had out there before Dollfuss put an end to them all. Her father had been something like Minister of Posts and Telegraphs under old Franz-Josef – and, yes, he had a grand Schloss somewhere in Hungary, or was it Slovakia? In any event, I remember there was a lot of complaint about how they’d lost all their property after the Versailles Conference, with the daughter saying it was all a “very good thing”. Quite a little to-do one night at the Legation, sort of family row. I remember that …’
Willis embarked on a witty social history of the family and their times in Vienna – but without mentioning the daughter again, so that I had to bring her back into the conversation.
‘But Lindsay knew this woman Maria, did he?’ Willis didn’t reply. ‘I suppose he must have,’ I went on, ‘if she sent him her book.’
‘Yes. Lindsay did know her,’ Willis said at last. ‘But only vaguely, I think. As I did. Lindsay handled what passed for “Information” at the Embassy then, so she came to see him about that: what Ramsay MacDonald was up to with the miners and so on.’
Willis steered the topic to an end in some good humour, as did Madeleine: ‘Before my time,’ she said. ‘I never heard of this Maria. One of Lindsay’s old flames was she, Willis?’
Willis chuckled deprecatingly. ‘Hardly, Madeleine. Hardly. Why, Lindsay was engaged to Eleanor at the time. She came out and joined him that spring, as I remember. Yes, just after the February battles: spring of ’34.’
I was pretty certain now that Willis was lying; a white lie of some sort, a tactful evasion in order to save Madeleine’s face: Maria von Karlinberg had been something more to Lindsay than just an importunate socialist newspaper reporter, I felt. And I was almost certain, too, that her diary had been dedicated to Lindsay: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s.’ What was new was the information that Eleanor had been out in Vienna at the same time. It seemed more and more as if Lindsay, not Willis, had been the inveterate philanderer all his life. Yet Willis – for Madeleine’s sake, I supposed – was protecting him, forty years on from the events. It was an act of love or charity towards her which brought him no comfort, however, for he looked awkwardly across the table at us both just then, his expression strained, red-faced almost, like a schoolboy who had got away with a whopping lie right in front of matron but who knows he will not succeed in the same with the headmaster. Willis was suddenly an unhappy man.
Yet the evening recovered among other purely happy topics, and the splendid food and more good wine passed round the golden tablecloth. I felt ashamed by the end of it that I had raised my awkward queries. And yet, I thought, why else were we all here, if not to discover Lindsay? Was it my fault that, in aiding the search, his devious soul was coming to light rather than his body? I suppose it was. I was the wrong person to help look for him: I bore him a grudge. Though perhaps a grudge, like love, is among the few things that ever truly lead us to anyone in the end. It keeps them in our mind, at least.
The maid had turned Rachel’s bed down and closed the windows and tidied up the chaos when we got back to her room that night, the shadowed lamplight falling tactfully over the renewed order.
‘I’m sorry for Willis,’ I said. ‘I don’t think now he’s a happy man at all.’
Rachel opened the window. The muggy summer air warmed the slightly chill room at once; a car hooted daringly somewhere out in the silent streets. Rachel kicked her shoes off, sitting by the window table – and then started to fiddle with the red roses once more, counting them aimlessly.
‘The maid’s pinched one!’ she said suddenly. ‘There were a dozen here before, I’m sure.’ She took all the roses out of the bowl now, to count them properly, and as she did so a small card fell from between the stalks onto the table. She picked it up.
‘Oh God! I know why Willis wasn’t very happy this evening. Look – the flowers – they weren’t for me at all. And in the rush I forgot to thank him. They were for Mummy. They put them in the wrong room, so she never mentioned them to him either.’
I looked at the damp little visiting card, the message almost indecipherable now, the ink run away almost to nothing in the water. But it was such a simple message it was clear enough: ‘Madeleine, with love, Willis’.
‘God, how he must have felt snubbed by her. Poor Willis. How awful.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. Or Madeleine’s. You can explain it tomorrow. Or I can – when I see him first thing at his office.’
‘Shall I call him now. At home?’
‘It’s midnight. I wouldn’t bother. Get Madeleine to call him first thing.’
‘I don’t have his home number anyway. How dreadful of us.’
Rachel stood up and started to undress. ‘Poor Willis,’ she said again, grieved.
‘Don’t,’ I said, touching her shoulder. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’
She stood back, looking at me. ‘A bowl of roses,’ she said at last. ‘“I sent a letter to my love, and on the way I dropped it: and one of you has picked it up, and put it in your pocket …”’
As she spoke she took her clothes off, piece by pice, and flung them all around her – wilfully pitching everything away as she recited the nursery game.
‘“It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you: but it was YOU!”’
Finally she said, ‘I’m not tired. It’s funny.’
‘You slept in the car.’
‘Sleep with me, won’t you?’
I did. But before we slept, pulling her face away from mine on the pillow, she said, ‘You need never be like Willis now, with me – you know that. Never ever.’
2
Poor Willis – poorer than any of us thought. At f
irst I wondered if, in awful revenge, he’d hoped Madeleine alone might find him, when she got to his apartment for her lunch date which she had arranged the previous evening with him. Or had he counted on my getting there, as I did, before the police, and learning something crucial from the chaos on the floor? – the letters, the photographs, all the memorabilia, as it seemed, of his hopeless love for Madeleine, strewn about the front room of the rather grand bachelor apartment he had on the rue Washington just off the avenue Louise.
There had been no reply when Madeleine had rung him first thing with her apologies that morning. The two women had then gone shopping while I had taken a taxi to the British EEC delegation’s offices in the Place Schumann, where Willis was to have let me know the results of his enquiries about Ivo Kovačič. But he never turned up. His secretary wasn’t really worried: until she’d called him twice and had no reply. I said I’d go and see what might have happened to him myself then – told her it was personal business in any case.
I was happy that morning coming out into the sunlight of the great ugly Place – happy in a way I’d thought never to recover: that manner of delight through another that quite blots out pain or error – and so I believed in my unlikely excuses for Willis. I had a future in love – which made the sight of Willis himself when I got to him, curled up on his sofa like a baby, all the more unhappy. Here was no Lothario, but a far too single-minded heart it seemed, whose constancy had never brought him anything. Willis, as he lay there next the remnants of pills and an empty whisky bottle, was like a corpse in a government poster, warning against fidelity. And I feared for my own future with Rachel, which seemed founded on just the same drug.
At first, when I’d discovered the porter and we had opened his door, I thought Willis had simply been burgled after he’d left for work, for he was nowhere to be seen in the dark apartment. It was a minute or two before we came on him – his small body wreathed voluptuously in cushions, embedded in a long white sofa by the picture window. The porter opened the curtains. They swished across on their silken pulleys and the sun filled the room, illuminating Willis like a corpse found in the library at the start of some Agatha Christie drama. Who Killed Cock Robin? But beyond the initial shock there was no more life to the play – and the mystery lay all before curtain-up, I thought, a long way in the past.
The body was surrounded by old letters and photographs. The photographs of Madeleine weren’t particularly special. Again – as in the attics at Glenalyth, where Lindsay, Eleanor and Susan had figured – here were pre-war holiday snaps featuring another variation in Lindsay’s stable: he and Madeleine and Willis this time, in Paris, and two of them leap-frogging on the cabined beach of what might have been Le Touquet. But Willis’s letters to Madeleine were another matter. I had to revise my view of him as the love-lorn swain entirely. There must have been about twenty of them, carbon copies, some in pencil but mostly type-written, going back many years – addressed from various foreign capitals, and a few on military stationery, written to her during the war – and other quite recent letters judging from the freshness of the paper. I glanced through several while the porter phoned and we waited for the police. One I found was addressed from Stockholm, dated June 1938.
‘Dear Madeleine,
It was so nice having your letter. You hardly have to thank me – much more the other way round: thank you for sharing your holiday with me. It was a wonderful gesture – you all coming over here in the first place. I won’t forget it – and of course I wish you both much happiness, it couldn’t be otherwise. I’m glad you like Lindsay’s bracelet. Their silver work over here is so simple, without any of that vulgar ornamentation on modern jewellery found everywhere else in Europe now … Dearest Madeleine – it’s a fine feeling now to know that you are happy – entirely positive – and you must never think of me in the future as leaning over your shoulder regretfully or any other nonsense of that sort …’
As far as I could see none of the letters echoed the dashing philanderer in Willis. On the contrary, they suggested a completely adult relationship between him and Madeleine, with nothing clandestine to it. The words were quite innocent in their friendly love, without apparent stress, reflecting familial concerns. Here was a perfectly natural intimacy. Why, then, had Willis apparently killed himself over it?
But where were the replies, I suddenly thought? – Madeleine’s letters back? I looked through the mess of paper. There was nothing from her. A vital piece of the puzzle was missing. Had she never written to him? It seemed inconceivable. Had he destroyed her letters? And, if so, why? I no longer saw Willis then as a pathetic figure, the victim of some naive passion, but as a perfectly sensible man who for some obscure reason had become involved in what seemed an entirely one-sided relationship. Willis appeared to have entered some kind of fraud in his dealings with Madeleine – and perhaps with Lindsay, too – which had finally, in the snubs of the previous evening, become too much for him so that he had terminated the agreement. And here only Madeleine herself could help me.
I was sorry in a way that she didn’t have to see Willis; I thought perhaps that, confronted with the actual body, as in a medieval judgment, her guilt or innocence in the matter might automatically emerge. As it was, the Embassy took everything off our hands while the police did no more than take my name and address before I left the sad apartment with its expensive bachelor chic on the rue Washington.
The others were back at the hotel when I returned there at midday – Madeleine in a breezy summer hat about to set off for her déjeuner intime. It was a bad few minutes in the lobby when I told her the news. But she fought it well before Rachel took her up to her room. I thought they’d be gone for some time. But they appeared again ten minutes later and Madeleine said she’d like a drink in the shadowy cocktail bar at the back of the lobby.
It was quiet and nearly empty – apart from two Germans munching peanuts loudly up at the bar. We sat in a corner, nursing brandies. As I’d always known, Madeleine, in the grip of a particular enthusiasm or when faced with a special difficulty, took on the sudden force of a crusader. And Willis’s demise, I supposed, might bring the best out in her. It did, to begin with. She listened to me, as I elaborated on the morning’s events, with a sharp, business-like attention – as though death were essentially a matter of balancing figures in a ledger. My talk of Willis’s letters to her, however, she took less confidently, as though unsure now of her earlier addition.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘a snub by itself surely isn’t enough for someone to kill himself.’ I didn’t look at her directly but I had her in the corner of my eye none the less. ‘And I can’t understand why he had all his letters around him, but none of yours –’ I went on.
Madeleine interrupted me with her answer, as though the better to underline its truth. ‘He must have destroyed them. Of course I wrote to him. We were great friends.’
‘Of course. But why destroy your letters – and so religiously keep copies of all his own?’
She must have been expecting this question and she accepted its implications now with sudden resignation, as an athlete in a hard-fought race accepts defeat only in the last few yards and simply walks across the line.
‘Willis was protecting me, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’
Rachel and I said nothing but Madeleine must have read our thoughts. ‘Oh, no – it wasn’t any indiscretion of that sort. Willis and I were very fond of each other but it was never anything more. No, it was about Lindsay. I sometimes wrote to him – oh, about things I didn’t understand. He never replied to me directly about this, just sent ordinary letters back. We talked when we met, in London mostly. That’s what we were going to do today at lunch.’ She paused and sighed before gathering herself. ‘I’m sure he destroyed the letters: I told him to. He was very loyal about Lindsay. He helped me a lot.’
‘But why? What was it about Daddy?’ Rachel leant forward eagerly.
‘At times … I felt I didn’t know hi
m. No, that’s too simple. I felt I was looking through him, through the person I knew so well – and into someone I didn’t know at all.’ She gestured impatiently. ‘Of course, it’s such a cliché – I know we all have to have our privacies. But with Lindsay sometimes …’ She stopped, looking at us both searchingly, as if we possessed the knowledge that would complete her sentence.
I said, ‘With Lindsay sometimes the person you didn’t know at all took over?’
‘No. Just once or twice I thought that second person was all there really was of him – and the man I knew was a front.’
‘You never mentioned any of this,’ I said tactfully. ‘It might have helped.’ I thought: at last this woman admits a crack in the armour of her love – and I felt for her suddenly, as for someone who might, in the end, become entirely bankrupt in her affections. But she replied now without any sign of such a doom.
‘It was all a long time ago. And Willis reassured me in any case – said it was the sort of tricky work Lindsay did. It came not to matter. Anyway, that was all I wrote to Willis about.’
‘Hardly enough for him to kill himself, Mummy.’
She turned to Rachel briskly. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I can’t say why he did it. I really can’t.’
‘Surely he wanted to marry you – and the news of Daddy’s existence again, together with the snubs …?’
‘Perhaps,’ Madeleine said. But she was being optimistic, I thought. Willis seemed basically sensible – not really suicide material at all. And I said as much. And then it struck me: ‘I wonder if someone killed him?’ I asked. ‘And the letters were strewn round everywhere to make it look like a romantic suicide?’
They both looked astonished. ‘But why? Who?’
‘I don’t know.’ I saw Willis’s death now as one with a real future in it – for I believed in Madeleine’s innocence then.
*
As happens, the door that closed to us, with Willis’s death, seemed to release the locks on another with barely any effort on our part whatsoever. I’d picked up the Brussels phone book by my bed before lunch. Radovič wasn’t there. He must have been ex-directory. I turned back to the letter K, idly looking for Kovačič – and there he was, suddenly jumping out of the page at me: Kovačič, Dr Ivo – the only one listed, at an address in the suburb of St Job on the outskirts of the city. The phone was no use: he could have put me off, denied ever knowing Lindsay. I had to confront him and take the chance that he was the right man, the University lecturer, Lindsay’s old bee-keeping friend from Zagreb. I bought a map and had a cab drop me near the area late that afternoon.
