Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  Between them they had set up a network of spies second to none, and needing none other than the people they fed off they never really had to use much influence, for the truth was that most people were betrayed by their own friends and families, willingly, with malice aforethought, and without a single telephone call having to be made. Envy being the father and mother of all gossip and malice being the child, there was never a chance that anyone in whom the de Ribes might be interested would not, at some time, be betrayed.

  ‘I am not sure that Mrs Smythson is not away, sir.’

  ‘Then find her, David, find her, and do your stuff. She’s a beautiful woman, and you’re a man, aren’t you?’

  Micklethwaite had to agree with this, but the fact of the matter was that, although Agnes Smythson was a very attractive woman, he could not find it in himself to like her. He could not even pretend to like her, and that made it difficult for him. He always preferred to be able to convince himself that he at least liked a woman before he took her to bed. It was probably a bit of a boyish thing, some lurking sentimentality, but there it was. He did not feel he could ever like Agnes Smythson. She was undoubtedly a beautiful woman, but so hard.

  ‘I hope I am a man, yes, sir. However. If I can’t locate Mrs Smythson, I’ll be back to you in twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Good.’

  Lewis was beginning to feel better, much better in fact. He would find Trilby whatever happened, one way or another. But despite having set his personal servant on the trail, he nevertheless determined to start to make his own investigations. He would begin by going to Trilby’s studio at once.

  In fact, as helpless in practical matters as rich men so often are, Lewis found himself outside his wife’s studio door before he remembered that she was the only person who possessed a key.

  ‘What now?’ he asked his chauffeur, more than a little aware that he was looking a fool and that his chauffeur was all too aware of the fact.

  ‘I think I know someone who can pick locks, sir.’

  The chauffeur bent down to the keyhole of the studio door while Lewis stared at the door knocker. The face of the dolphin, for some reason that he could not name, reminded him of Trilby. Perhaps it was because she so loved dolphins, always looking for them when they were in Cornwall on their honeymoon. The memory of their delightful honeymoon being so painful, he turned his eyes from the door knocker to the chauffeur.

  ‘Come on, man, hurry up. Where do we go next?’

  The chauffeur remained phlegmatic, as he always did when he was dealing with Lewis. ‘We don’t go anywhere, sir.’

  Lewis frowned as his driver returned to the Rolls-Royce waiting by the pavement, and opening the boot of the car removed from it a grey cloth roll the inside of which, some seconds later, revealed itself to be filled with keys of different sorts and sizes.

  ‘Very useful, sir. I always keep this, for emergencies. After all, you never know, do you, sir?’

  The chauffeur straightened up. Lewis stared at him, realising in an instant that if his driver could open Trilby’s studio door with such ease, he could open many another door too. Doors that Lewis had thought inviolable were available to Lyons. It was at these moments that he found he was grateful to David Micklethwaite. No-one, after all, could possibly use a key to open his memory. There at least, in Micklethwaite’s head, was the safest of safes, the safe that had no key.

  Lewis stepped into the small hallway, and perhaps because he had obtained entry by such a devious method he quite forgot to leave the chauffeur outside, which meant that Lyons stepped in after him.

  ‘Stay there, Lyons, will you? I mean, guard the door. I don’t want my wife coming back and finding us – particularly me – here. She doesn’t like me coming in, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It is ridiculous, but it seems she has some sort of bee in her bonnet about my seeing her paintings. You know what women are like, don’t you, Lyons?’

  ‘Yes, sir. She was very highly strung, wasn’t she?’

  Lewis turned at that ‘was’. ‘She is very highly strung, Lyons, very, that is why I have to come here to examine her paintings. They may well prove to be – you know – a guide to her state of mind. Show up her – well – her unbalanced approach to life.’

  ‘I don’t think Mrs James was unbalanced, if you don’t mind my saying, sir. She never struck me as being unbalanced at any time, if you will forgive me saying so, sir.’

  Again Lewis turned. He would have liked to have said, ‘What the hell business is it of yours, what she was, or is?’ But they both knew he could not for the simple reason that they had both just broken into what was to all intents and purposes private property.

  ‘Oh, don’t you, Lyons? That is interesting.’

  He meant quite the opposite. Lewis did not find Lyons’s opinion at all interesting. In fact, he suddenly realised that he had probably never before heard an opinion from Lyons the whole time Lyons had been working for him, thank God.

  ‘Mrs James was, or is, just a modern young woman, sir. She did not understand being caged. That does not mean that she was insane, if you don’t mind me saying, sir, it just means that she was not the old-fashioned sort. Not the kind to have her feet bound like a Chinee. I drove her so often I should know. She was a nice young woman. Nothing mad about her, or insane, sir, if that is of any comfort. And I grew to know her quite well, really I did. She might have been a bit highly strung, but that is all.’

  ‘Dr Mellon thinks that losing our baby accounts, probably more than anything else, for her recent erratic behaviour. That is Dr Mellon’s private opinion and his medical one too.’

  Lewis was now bored with his chauffeur and his opinions, so he wandered off down the big room in search of some clues as to Trilby’s exit from his life, where she could have gone, and with whom.

  Lewis had never had any interest in Trilby’s painting, any more than he had much interest in her as an individual, once they were married. Women were not, to Lewis’s mind, individuals; being a newspaper man he did not think of the opposite sex in that way. As far as he was concerned women were either the kind that were prepared to wear black lace underwear for the fashion columns, or the ones who posed for the Society pages in a cashmere twinset and a string of pearls. They were either two-faced or faithful, divorced or happily married. All in all they were either good girls or bad women, faithful wives or naughty mistresses, all of the types reflected on some page or other of the hundreds of pages of his publications. What they were not, at any time, and he could never bring himself to think of them as such, it was too complicated and somehow irritating – what women were not, at any time, were people. Men were people, not women.

  So it was with a sense of shock bordering on panic that he now viewed Trilby’s paintings, noticing with a mounting, unreasonable anger that she had even signed them Trilby Smythson, not Trilby James.

  At work here was not the young innocent girl that he had met and married, the creator of the amusing little cartoon series that he had put out for a few weeks under the pseudonym Jerry. Here was not the young woman who had so decoratively occupied the seat at the other end of Lewis’s dining table or graced his drawing room, here was not the innocent girl who had made love to him, or sat silently admiring him as he aired his views and entertained his friends, here was an individual with a strong and passionate sense of the world, a love affair with colour, and a vigorous style all her own.

  Many of the paintings, for some reason he could not understand, were of the tropics, but they were not the travel posters of most people’s depiction but splashes of brilliantly coloured and exotic plants, and beaches filled with happy natives wearing nothing at all.

  Of course Trilby being Trilby had given many of the paintings humorous titles, such as Ascot Hats for a painting depicting African ladies with red and yellow bandannas around their heads, and absolutely nothing else on their bodies except broad, happy smiles.

  Aside from the exotic there were paintings of
what Lewis’s papers always referred to as ‘ordinary decent people’. A railway man standing outside the closed gates of an Underground line. A flock of ducks on the Serpentine being fed by a nanny and child, an old lady with white hair seated on a chair, staring out with calm eyes at the world that she knew she might, quite soon, be leaving.

  All the paintings were meticulously notated and framed, with the exception of the old lady who, Lewis could see when he grew closer, was not yet finished. This must therefore be the last painting she had been working on. Mentally Lewis turned away from the words ‘last painting’, dreading that it might be true.

  He might hate Trilby at that moment, he might be hoping that she was mad (after all only a mad-woman would leave Lewis James, wouldn’t they?) but he definitely did not want her dead. He could not afford to have two wives who died on him. It could destroy him in the eyes of the world. They would think that there was something wrong with him!

  It was an appalling thought and one that had haunted him for the past hours. His editors, his staff, his servants, all with accusations in their eyes, all imagining him to be some kind of Bluebeard, some kind of monster, a man whose wives so hated him that they had both taken their own lives rather than carry on living with him.

  ‘You have dropped my wife here quite often, Lyons, haven’t you? Do you, by any chance, know this woman?’

  Lyons, his chauffeur’s cockaded hat under his arm, came up to the canvas, and stared up at it. He knew very well who the lady was, but he was not prepared to tell Mr James. He liked Mrs James too much. Besides, it was none of his business. Moreover – he looked at Mr James, standing there in his expensive Savile Row suit, his valet-ironed shirt, his gold cufflinks showing at just the required length on his shirt cuff – he had never thought that the governor treated his poor little wife as he should.

  Always sending Lyons chasing after her, spying on her, as if she was a bloody Nazi agent, not a young woman with a will of her own. Time after time Lyons had been reduced to feeling like a private detective sent on some sleazy surveillance mission, following the poor girl to some innocent place – the art shop where she purchased her paints, the café where she bought herself sandwiches at lunchtime, the hairdressers where she had her hair trimmed into its modish elfin style.

  ‘I knew she was painting an old lady, lately that is, the friend of a friend, I think, but I never did ask her name or anything, Mr James. After all, we were not meant to communicate too much with Mrs James, were we, sir?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘As I remember it, sir, it was on your orders.’

  Ordinarily, Lyons would have smiled at this palpable hit, but not with Mr James. If he had dared to smile at such a dig Mr James would have noticed, and sacked him. Instead he stared at one of the paintings as intently as any prospective buyer.

  ‘On my orders was it, Lyons? Oh, yes of course, I suppose, it must have been, now I come to think of it.’

  Lewis had the feeling that he was getting nowhere with his chauffeur and it was making him unnaturally humble.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Lyons continued with some relish. ‘If you remember, sir, it was on your orders, to all the staff at all times, that we were asked not to talk to Mrs James more than was absolutely necessary.’ He was flinging the words back in his employer’s face, and enjoying it too. ‘That, sir, is why I would not know who Mrs James was painting, or why she spent so much time at her studio rather than at home. I knew it was your orders that I was to mind my own business, so I left it at that, at minding my own business. Left it to her who she was painting. None of my business, really, as I say, on your orders. I dropped Mrs James off, and I picked her up, sometimes, if you remember, sir, with you, and other than that I just followed your orders, but I never knew what she was painting – sir. That would not have been right, not after you had made it so clear that we were not to communicate with her more than was strictly necessary – sir.’

  Lewis now had the very definite feeling that his chauffeur was cheeking him, but he was damned if he knew what to do about it. It was a fact that no matter what he said to Lyons just lately he always had that same feeling, that Lyons felt himself to be superior to Lewis in some way. Trouble was he was a damned good driver, which made it difficult to get rid of him. And what was more, Lewis knew that other people had been after Lyons over the years, but Lyons had remained loyal to Lewis, and that after all was something.

  ‘Oh well, I’ll soon find out, no doubt someone else knows who this old bag is. I’ll ask Madame de Ribes, she knows everyone. She will no doubt be able to identify the old lady for me.’

  Lyons nodded, his face as inscrutable as Mrs Woo’s, as it always was when he was being made privy to information that he knew would probably be his and his alone.

  ‘Yes, sir. Madame de Ribes should be able to help you, she usually can, can’t she, sir?’ He turned on his heel as if that was an end to the matter, but his mind was working overtime, as it usually was when it came to Mr James. He did not like his employer. He liked his employer’s little wife. He did not want the poor little thing found, not, that is, if she did not want to be found.

  Piers was talking to Trilby. His subject, not really surprisingly in the circumstances, was her husband, Lewis.

  ‘I think you will find that Lewis probably no longer cares where you are by now. I mean, once he found your letter saying you don’t want to be married to him any more, that would be more or less that, I should have thought.’

  ‘I wish I could believe you.’

  ‘There’s been nothing in the news, and none of his reporters have been sent after you. If his people cannot find you, he will probably wipe your name from the slate, and that will be that. Besides, you must remember, you have rights. No-one but no-one should be forced to continue in a marriage where they are desperately unhappy.’

  Trilby leaned forward. Despite the fact that Piers was older than herself, despite the fact that he had fought the Mau Mau, he was naïve.

  ‘Remember when you were in the army, Piers?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You had rights then, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Remember what they amounted to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They amounted to what my corporal would call “diddly squat”.’

  Trilby smiled. ‘Exactly. Well, it’s the same with wives. We have diddly squat when it comes to rights. That is the reality, whatever anyone tells you. Besides, by leaving I know I will have dented the pride of the great Lewis James, and he won’t like that. You see, what is difficult to understand is that he can do anything he wants. I have sat at his dinner parties and heard him and his friends discussing ordinary people. They – we – are gnats on their windscreens, probably less than gnats, really. To him, and people like him, we are entirely disposable. And besides, even should he divorce me – what then? I shall be a pariah. In England getting divorced is still the one sin you do not commit, even nowadays.’

  ‘I think you are exaggerating out of fear.’

  ‘I wish I was, but I know that, one way or another, Lewis will find me, he will track me down, wherever I am.’

  ‘This is the 1950s. Not even the great Lewis James can behave like Hitler, Trilby.’

  ‘He can and he will. More than that, he has spies, everywhere. I haven’t a chance of not being found, and then – well, I don’t really know. After all—’ Trilby stopped suddenly.

  ‘After all?’

  ‘They have only just repealed the act that allows a husband to put his wife into an asylum if she can’t answer six questions put to her by his doctors! Look at poor Mrs Eliot – the poet’s wife – he had her locked up.’ She smiled. ‘Heaven only knows, I would never have got past the first question, let alone six!’

  ‘Lewis will have to get past me, remember? Think of me as your knight in patched-up armour.’

  Trilby smiled at Piers as he raised his elbow and displayed his patched jumper, and the
n she gazed out of the wide open kitchen window.

  It was well past midnight, the night sky was a myriad of beautiful stars, the chorus line accompanying the biggest star of all – the moon. Lewis would be somewhere out there, under some portion of that same sky, but not as yet near. For now it was enough to listen to the hooting of the owls, to hear the night breeze rustling through the thickets and wonder idly when she went outside for their last walk of the evening if she would see a flash of pale emerald that would signal the eyes of a hunting fox staring out of some hidden hedgerow. Of a sudden it seemed to her that she was just part of that same natural world that lay beyond the kitchen window, one of the hunted, always waiting, daily, nightly, pushing away the thought that one of these days, when she turned round, there would be Lewis, the fox, behind her.

  David Micklethwaite had booked the top suite of a hotel not far from Glebe Street. He knew the form very well. He should, after all he had been through it many times, if not with Mrs Smythson with many another married or divorced woman. But they, happily for him, had been of his own choosing, while this woman, although undoubtedly beautiful, was quite definitely not.

  He tried not to think of this as he waited for her in the downstairs bar drinking a glass of champagne a little too quickly, constantly checking his tie in the mirror behind the bar.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’

  He had not remembered her as being quite so good-looking. He turned and smiled at her, hoping that he was looking as sincere in his welcome as he had ever done when meeting some aspiring young journalist who was all too prepared to do anything with him, or for him, but again his imagination failed him.

  She was wearing a black beaded top with a tight black skirt, itself decorated around the hem with tiny beads. It was beautifully cut, he could appreciate that, and he liked black. Her clothes were expensive, and her jewellery was expensive. He liked that too. He liked a woman to look expensive. He did not know why, because really the time could not matter less, but he found himself glancing down at his own expensive Rolex watch as if he had a train to catch, which was ridiculous, because he had a driver and a car on tap whenever he wanted them.