The Cruellest Month

by Hazel Holt

  ‘Oh, thank you, Tony,’ I said, ‘that was fascinating. I feel really privileged!’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact we do what we call extended tours quite frequently – you could have gone on one of those – it would have been more informative than I was. It does the whole thing – Duke Humfrey, the Radcliffe Camera and the underground store – the works.’

  ‘I think it was cosier going round with you,’ I said and went into Room 45 to check through a few final things for my notes.

  It was about teatime when I emerged and I stood for a moment savouring the nostalgia that this time of day in Oxford always gives me. It’s stronger, of course, in the winter term when you come out into the dusk, but even in broad daylight the feeling is there. For a few moments I was an undergraduate again, an afternoon’s work behind me, about to go back to my room in college to toast crumpets or perhaps go out to tea – I could see the look of concentration on Rupert’s face as he carefully cut into the Fuller’s walnut cake so that the white icing didn’t crumble. I was so lost in memories that I was half-way down Parks Road before I realised that I hadn’t collected my shopping bag from the desk at Duke Humfrey and had to go all the way back for it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sun was really hot as I drove into Oxford the next morning. I switched on a tape of some Elizabethan music and thought how nice it would be to go a-maying – what-ever that might involve. If the weather went on like this I might drive back to Taviscombe by way of Stratford. The gardens at New Place and Hall Croft (one of my favourite places in the whole world) would be beautiful now.

  As I walked down the narrow lane into the Parks I wondered if I might see Fitz. Sure enough, as I crossed the grass I saw his tall figure walking towards one of the seats under the trees. I watched him with some amusement. The stick certainly was for effect since he wasn’t leaning on it but, on the contrary, twirling it in a rather dashing way as he walked quite briskly without its aid. Pippa was following close at his heels, making occasional little forays in various directions as some new smell caught her attention. They looked, as I’m sure Fitz intended, the perfect archetypal picture of a distinguished elderly gentleman and his dog Out For A Walk.

  I waited until he was settled on his seat and then approached.

  ‘Hello Fitz,’ I said, ‘isn’t it a glorious day.’

  ‘Ah, Chloe.’

  It seemed to me that Fitz was displeased for some reason, but I persevered.

  ‘No cricket today?’

  ‘As you see.’

  The monosyllabic reply and the fact that he didn’t invite me to join him on the seat indicated that he was definitely put out about something. I was curious to find out what it was so I sat down beside him, bending forward to stroke Pippa’s head. There was a brief silence and then Fitz said, ‘Bill Howard tells me that you are playing at detectives.’

  So that was it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, immediately on the defensive, as I so often was with Fitz.

  ‘I would have thought that such things were more properly left to the police, who are presumably qualified to deal with them.’

  ‘But, you see, they thought that it was an accident – it was only after Tony told me about how he found her that I realised that they hadn’t had all the facts and couldn’t have made a proper judgement.’

  ‘And why should you feel that you were obliged to do their investigating for them?’

  ‘Poor Tony was very upset…’

  ‘I can only suppose,’ he said distastefully, ‘that you have lived for too long in a dreary seaside town where the only form of mental stimulus is vulgar curiosity about one’s neighbours’ affairs. I had not thought you would have sunk to such a level of existence.’

  Fitz in his supercilious mood had always made me feel angry and resentful.

  ‘It wasn’t vulgar curiosity,’ I said. I always sounded like a petulant child when I was arguing with him. ‘I just wanted to help. The police had missed certain things – I thought if I tried to piece things together…’

  He gave a short laugh.

  ‘Here after ignorance, instruction speaks;

  Here, clarity of candour, history’s soul,

  The critical mind, in short; no gossip-guess.’

  I groaned inwardly. When Fitz began quoting The Ring and the Book it meant that he was at his most difficult and opinionated, capable of pursuing a subject to death simply to show off his superiority in argument.

  ‘Well, why not?’ I asked defiantly. ‘Don’t you think I am capable of connected reasoning?’

  ‘To be honest, no. It has, indeed, always been a source of sorrow to me that your work – especially that essay on George Eliot – was marred by a lack of lucidity. You rely too much – wholly, perhaps – upon a purely subjective approach to your subject – what our American friends call “a gut reaction”, I believe. The intellectual content seems to me to be largely lacking. This might be forgivable, perhaps, in a young, overenthusiastic female undergraduate, but it is unfortunate, to say the least, in a person of mature years with some pretensions to a critical approach to English literature. How, I ask myself, could you expect to achieve the “patent-truth-extracting-process.” as the Master calls it.’

  It was one of his affectations always to refer to Browning and not Henry James as the Master, something that has always irritated me. Although I’m not one of those self-assured critics who believe that everything I write has the authority of words handed down directly from Mount Sinai (indeed, like many of my age and sex, I tend to suffer from a positive lack of self-confidence) I am still upset and offended if anyone makes derogatory remarks about my work.

  ‘All right, so I know I’m not an academic like you,’ I poured all the scorn I could muster into the word, ‘but the very fact that I haven’t been living in an ivory tower for the past fifty odd years but have had to battle my way in the real world, where people actually live and suffer may have made me a little more responsive to works of literature that were written by real people than you are!’

  He made no reply but tilted his head back in an attitude of arrogant enquiry which so infuriated me that I burst out, ‘Anyway, poor wretched Gwen Richmond has some rights, and if she was murdered (and I’m sure she was) then I don’t want to see her killer going free.’

  As I spoke Gwen Richmond’s name he stiffened.

  ‘You will oblige me by not mentioning that creature’s name...’

  ‘Yes,’ I said placatingly, ‘I know about Lance and how she hurt you – you and Elaine – and I’m very sorry for you both, it must have been terrible. But, even so, she didn’t deserve to be killed, she had the right to live.’

  I paused, slightly fearful of what I had said, and there was a moment’s silence.

  ‘She had no right to live.’ He dropped the words like slivers of ice into the silence.

  ‘For God’s sake, Fitz...’

  ‘She ruined two lives and destroyed a third, how could the God you invoke have allowed her to live so long. She was an old woman when she died. He – he was scarcely more than a boy – all his life and work before him, before us all. She was vicious and without principles…’

  ‘But she loved him.’

  ‘Love!’ He spat out the word as if it was something unspeakable. ‘What did she know about love – lust, per-haps, and ambition and greed. What do any of you know about real love?’

  ‘I know about love,’ I said. ‘I too have lost someone I cared about very much, so I do know how you must have felt.’

  ‘There is no comparison. Lance was someone special, he would have been a great writer – his loss was immeasurable.’

  I was seized with a furious rage. How dare Fitz imply that Peter’s life, all the things he had achieved, all the love that he had given to Michael and to me, were of no account. I lashed out.

  ‘Well, certainly you had a motive for killing her – by your own admission a far bigger motive than anyone else.’

  ‘I could not have killed her
.’ The reply was stiff and formal.

  ‘Oh, I know you were supposed to be in Duke Humfrey that afternoon, but—’ A thought struck me, of such overwhelming significance that I rushed on more in excitement now than anger. ‘But there was a way you could have done it, giving yourself an alibi in Duke Humfrey – making a great fuss about some books so that everyone would remember seeing you – and still have got to Room 45 with-out going past George at the desk. You could have joined one of those extended tours – I bet there was one that day - and gone through the underground store and then, when you came up in the New Bodleian you could have slipped away, found Gwen and killed her. Then all you would have had to do was walk casually past when George was occupied with someone coming in – he doesn’t notice people going out, any more than the man on the desk in Duke Humfrey does. It would have been easy.’

  I paused for a moment to see how Fitz was reacting, but his face was like stone with no vestige of emotion. I went on.

  ‘You were physically capable of killing her. You are tall and quite vigorous for your age – in spite of that walking stick – and she was small and frail and sitting down, taken by surprise, no doubt by your sudden appearance – though, even after all these years she would have known at once who you were. I don’t know how you meant to kill her – but the fact that you planned it all with so much care means that that was in your mind, but I think the actual killing didn’t happen as you intended. What I imagine happened was that you spelled out to her, as you have to me, the enormity of her crime and she protested - that she loved Lance, that her grief had been as great as yours. This would have been intolerable to you and so you snatched up that large, metal-bound book and hit out at her and killed her. When you saw what you had done, you knew you must make it look like an accident, so you arranged the body and the ladder and then loosened the screws – with a paperknife, perhaps, there was one there, Tony says – and brought the shelves down on top of her. And that’s how you lolled Gwen Richmond.’

  I found I was breathless, partly from my long speech and partly from excitement as I fitted each possibility into place. There was no doubt in my mind that I had solved the mystery of Gwen Richmond’s death and I felt as triumphant as if I had solved a fiendishly difficult crossword puzzle.

  I turned to face Fitz and was brought up short by his look of cold contempt.

  ‘Have you finished expounding your theories?’

  I was silent.

  ‘I see I must make my meaning plainer for you to understand. When I said I could not have killed her, I meant that such an act would be impossible for me. To kill her would have been to recognise her existence, to admit that she had any part at all in Lance’s life.’ His voice was unsteady as he spoke the name. ‘She was merely an instrument – vile and without meaning in itself – of his death. He was killed because in a moment of weakness he chose to move out into another world, where we could not protect him, a world full of mean and unworthy creatures, like that woman, who would debase his talent and eat away at his love for us. In the beginning,’ he went on, a note of self-distaste in his voice, ‘I thought that she was a harmless creature, someone who would entertain Elaine, even amuse me. But, of course, it was all deception and treachery. We learned, Elaine and I, the hard way, not to trust anyone again.’

  He paused and I sat silently, confused and unhappy. Then he continued sardonically. ‘If, however, you merely wish me to establish an alibi – is that what you investigators call it?

  – then perhaps the testimony of the Hobbes Professor of Moral Philosophy will do. I left Duke Humfrey with him just after two-thirty. And if that is not sufficient, we may add the names of Professor Gilbertson, Dr Montgomery and the Dean of Wadham. We were attending a meeting in All Souls – about an exhibition at the Casa Guidi in Florence next year, if that is relevant.’

  I sat submissively while his scornful voice went remorselessly on. When he had finished there was silence again, a long silence, heavy with unspoken words. I somehow found the courage to speak.

  ‘Fitz ... I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. You made me angry – I got carried away by a stupid theory and didn’t think…’

  ‘That is what I have been complaining about.’ Again the icy contempt. ‘You do not think. You go plunging about in a mindless way, blundering through peoples lives with no thought for those very feelings that you are so anxious to lay claim to yourself. You open up barely healed wounds, challenge the memory to face things that have been carefully hidden away for nearly a lifetime – and all for what? So that you can indulge yourself with a sort of game, a superior kind of acrostic, so that you can fancy yourself cleverer than your fellow creatures by reason of your deductions. You are despicable.’

  There was nothing I could say. So much of what he had said was true. I had been carried away by my ‘theory’ to such an extent that I hadn’t stopped to consider the people involved. Of course Fitz couldn’t have killed Gwen. I had exonerated Freda Lassiter simply on instinct. How much worse was it to have accused Fitz (even in my mind, let alone to his face like this) who I knew so well. It would not be virtue or compassion that would stop him but a kind of fastidiousness that would never allow him to commit such an act. And I had hurt him deeply. I had lost an old friend, for I knew that he would never forgive me for what I had said.

  His next words seemed to confirm this.

  ‘Since it is unlikely that we will ever meet again,’ he said, and now there was malice in his voice, ‘there is something I feel you should know.’

  I looked at him without speaking.

  ‘It is about Rupert.’

  ‘Rupert!’

  I felt a sudden cold premonition – I knew that he was going to say something I couldn’t bear to hear.

  ‘Do you remember that last summer? You had just gone down, Rupert was coming to spend some time with you and your mother at Taviscombe, but he had to cancel it at the last minute.’

  ‘Yes. He had to go to Italy with his parents.’

  ‘Not with his parents. With me.’

  ‘With you?’ I said uncomprehendingly.

  ‘We were lovers of course,’ Fitz said casually. ‘But Rupert was a conventional boy and his parents were very conventional. His father, as you know, was a judge, so Rupert felt the need to be extra careful – the law, you may remember, at that time was not kind. So it seemed expedient that he should be seen to have a “girlfriend”.’ He put contemptuous inverted commas round the phrase.

  ‘And that my dear Chloe is where you came in – especially, of course, when his parents visited him and you were carefully trotted out.’

  I had a sudden vivid memory of sitting nervously in the Randolph at a family lunch party with Sir Frederick and Lady Drummond. He had a booming voice and an overbearing manner, but was basically kind; she was fashionable and sharp-eyed and did not approve of me at all.

  Fitz was speaking again.

  ‘You were so amazingly naive! I couldn’t believe it at first, but you actually believed that Rupert was in love with you and that I – I was a charming friend!’

  It is true. I was naive. It seems incredible to imagine now, but in those days I (and most of the girls I knew) barely realised that such relationships existed. Oscar Wilde we knew about, of course, and that that sort of thing was against the law. I remember, when I was about sixteen, describing a friend of ours as a bit queer, and how my brother Jeremy took me to one side and explained why I mustn’t use that particular phrase. I was astonished – not at the word’s double meaning, but because it had never occurred to me that anyone one actually knew might be described in such away.

  Of course, it explained so much about Rupert – the elaborate and extravagant phrases and the chaste kisses – the idea of love was cleverly planted in my mind, and I was so willing to believe him, so besotted by his charm and beauty that I eagerly accepted the base coin that he offered as pure gold.

  ‘You must have wondered.’ Fitz said spitefully, ‘what on earth Rupert could possib
ly have seen in you when he might have had his pick of any of the really beautiful or intelligent girls around. But, of course, they would have discovered very soon where his predilections lay. Only sweet, simple Chloe ... You were a constant source of amazement and delight to us, my dear, we could not believe that you were true.’

  I sat rigid, icy cold, unable to move or speak.

  ‘The letter you wrote to me when he died,’ the remorse-less voice went on, ‘I felt that perhaps I should have told you then – but it would have been too cruel, would it not? Cruel,’ he repeated harshly. I heard the pain behind the malice. Perhaps I deserved it – pain for pain.

  ‘It seemed to us incredible that you never solved our little deception when you had such a splendid clue.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘Why your very own namesake, my dear, the poet Prior – no relation we always felt – what did he almost say:

  The merchant to secure his treasure,

  Conveys it in a borrowed name:

  Chloe serves to grace my measure:

  But Fitz, he is my real flame.’

  He got up rather stiffly from the seat, raised his hat and bowed. ‘Goodbye – Chloe.’

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I was so overwhelmed with hurt and humiliation that for a while I simply couldn’t focus on the world around me. My eyes were blurred with tears of rage and shame at my own folly. Then came the dreadful sense of loss.

  After a while I became aware of a movement close by. A small white dog had run up to me and dropped a stick at my feet. Automatically I bent to pick it up and standing up I threw it with all my strength as far as I could. The dog ran after it barking excitedly.

  Now that I was on my feet, I moved slowly away from the seat and across the grass. I walked slowly because I felt weak, as if I was recovering from a long illness. People passed me but they seemed to have no substance. They were like shadows cast by the sun that blazed down as I trudged on in a sort of daze. Only when I was outside the Parks did some of the numbness wear off. I stood staring at the great horse chestnut tree outside the Clarendon Laboratory, deliberately forcing myself to concentrate on the white blossoms, trying to pick out each particular flower head.