Joe Banks sat down and observed the rest of the proceedings with a face as black as the thunder accumulating overhead. His hope that the Savernake meeting would be mostly attended by residents keen to sell their homes had been disappointed. To begin with the home owners were outnumbered by the tenants, and worse, from his point of view, half the owners were apparently just as furious about the prospective sell-off of the estate and park as those with less to gain. His chief ally, Councillor Arlene Phipps, sat beside him, glumly reflecting that Joe had predicted that opposition split into property owners and non-property owners on an estate never notable for its energy or cohesiveness would crumble fast. For once he’d been wrong. The audience, men and women of all ages, children, black people and white, some Asian was tough, vociferous and against him. Mrs Walters stood up and remembered her house being destroyed in the Blitz, her husband and herself living, with their first child, with her parents, their relief and pleasure when her flat was allocated to them. She had brought up her children there, she said. She didn’t want to move.
Mohammed Nasruddin, described on Joe Banks’s list of residents as a newsagent, asked detailed questions about the legality of the sale in the first place. He asked what guarantees tenants would have about their future accommodation, if they agreed to rehousing. He attacked the whole concept of building an expensive housing project in that area, speaking fluently and logically and getting, when he concluded, a rousing cheer.
A large, overweight woman who did not identify herself stood up and said loudly, ‘This is our home. Mr Banks has told us what he’ll do with the money to help Kenton, but that won’t help us. We live here too. We don’t want it sold off to a lot of rich people who’ll bring nothing to Kenton. I was born here, my parents were born here. My children were born on this estate. We belong here. We don’t want the place sold off to yuppies. We want to stay.’ She sat down to applause.
Les Dowell sat stony-faced in his seat, in some ways almost as appalled as Joe Banks by this clear manifestation of the public will, entirely unmanipulated by himself on revolutionary principles. Joe Banks had thought the residents would be torn by differing interests, private feuds, and racial tensions, Les Dowell, totalitarian at heart, had a private belief in the Mob, unwashed, illiterate, benumbed and easily swayed, destined to be introduced to revolution by people like himself. Now here they were, these latter-day peasants and workers, acting on their own initiative. In different ways the meeting was a shock to both wings of the Kenton Council Left.
Meanwhile, Ben Gathercole, who’d got what he wanted for the Kenton Post and could no longer bear to sit in the sweltering heat found himself writing ‘Vanessa’ on his pad. Restless and unable to face going home, he slipped out, drove to a bar in Leicester Square, got a bit drunk and then went on to a party in Kensington. Angry when he didn’t turn up, Frances hid her feelings when he at last came home, his face so unhappy that she realised dully she was losing him.
At nine that night, just as Mohammed Nasruddin was depressing Joe Banks by suggesting that even if the Department of the Environment was prepared to let the sale go ahead, the law courts might overturn the decision, Sir Bernard Fellows, at his son’s mews house in Kensington was talking on the phone to the spy Joe Banks had planted at the meeting. From Nigel’s little office, more like a cupboard than a room, he could hear the noise of a party in full swing. Jasmine and Nigel were entertaining.
He finished his conversation, hung up, then pushed through the crowd, found Nigel and explained he was tired and must go home. Nigel saw him off.
The house was full of people, the small patio lit with spotlights discreetly placed in the trailing foliage. Jasmine, having heard about Annie’s discovery at the cottage, had rung her sister and persuaded her to come. ‘Come and enjoy yourself. I promise you Julian and that nasty Tamsin won’t be there. Apart from anything else, Nigel can’t stand them. He has to put up with them. It’s business.’
‘Julian’s business,’ Annie had said nastily, ‘was built up on ten thousand pounds left to me by Aunt Margaret.’
‘But come to the party,’ insisted Jasmine.
‘I will,’ agreed Annie.
‘Sorry about Tom, and everything,’ Jasmine said.
Annie had been more upset than she would have imagined by Tom’s treachery but, unused to confused feelings, felt she couldn’t discuss it with Jasmine, so she changed the subject.
‘What’s happening about the suitcase?’ she asked Jasmine.
‘Anstruther’s back at Durham House on a visit and he’s still trying to get Howard and Juliet to let him go through it and they keep on fobbing him off. One day when he came round they actually locked the door and hid, pretending to be out. But he’s been getting at Rupert and the other executor, that man from Oxford, and now they’re trying to persuade them to yield up the case. They’ll have to give in, I suppose. I don’t see why they don’t just sell it to Anstruther—’
‘Neither do I,’ Annie said. She knew Jasmine still wanted to talk about Tom. ‘It’s peculiar, isn’t it?’
‘So you’re coming – definitely?’ Jasmine pressed.
‘Yes. Thanks, Jasmine. It’ll make a change,’ said Annie obediently, and hung up quickly. Jasmine wanted to raise issues she didn’t want to think about. There’d been little time after the shock of Julian’s walking out before she had rather suddenly found Tom back in her life, and in her bed. She’d not had a chance to work out Tom’s impact on her. She’d been avoiding emotion, like someone who’s been beaten up and is avoiding any situation where it could happen again. Vanessa, she thought, wasn’t like that. She had been happy once with her husband, had wanted to find the same kind of happiness again. Still, they had both been shockingly let down and at the moment she did not feel like going to a party.
Nevertheless, she slowly got dressed, watched sourly by Melanie who’d hoped the invitation might have been extended to include her.
‘Are you wearing that for a party?’ she exclaimed incredulously, when Annie put on a beaded brown top above a long plain linen skirt.
‘It belonged to my grandmother,’ Annie told her. Melanie shook her head pityingly.
When she arrived, late, at Jasmine’s small, perfect house in a mews off a quiet, paved street in Kensington there were several people outside with drinks while inside, the little house was bursting at the seams. She couldn’t see Jasmine, as she pushed in, took a glass from the waiter’s tray, looked for someone she knew. The long room leading out on to the patio was crowded with well-dressed men and women in shiny dresses, smoothly made up.
‘Who’re you?’ asked a jacketless man in black evening trousers and a ruffled white shirt, leaning into her slightly.
‘Jas’s sister,’ responded Annie. ‘Who’re you?’
‘Captain Armitage – you’re the sister who when the angel handed out looks, you thought she said hard books, so you asked her for ever such a lot – the history professor – am I right?’
‘Annie’s my name,’ Annie said sourly, hating Jasmine’s friends, wishing Jasmine wouldn’t always tell people about her brainy sister. A woman in a large pearl necklace collided with her and gave her a hostile stare, as if she, Annie, had barged into her.
By the time five minutes had passed, Annie, fresh from Kenton, found this assembly of rich, or rich-seeming people more familiar. She remembered that at such gatherings scents clash, voices are very loud and from time to time boredom and brutality surface. There was no sign of Nigel or Jasmine and she knew no one else. She was staring at a framed photograph of Nigel and his brother and sister, Sim with a bat, in cricket trousers, and their sister Claudia, sulking in shorts beside them, and wondering whether to leave, when she was bumped into from the back and almost pushed into the white marble fireplace.
‘I came to say hallo,’ said Ben Gathercole in a rather drunk voice. ‘You might not like me much, but you’re the only person I know in the room.’
‘How did you get here?’ asked Annie not bothering to be pol
ite to the man who was making her friend Vanessa so unhappy.
‘I might ask you the same,’ he responded. ‘I’ve been at the Savernake Estate. Now I’m here as part of a scheme to seduce and influence the press, I suppose. I’ve had a frank and friendly chat with the Honourable Nigel. He told me how wonderful the Savernake Project was going to be. Likeable chap, the Honourable Nige. Then he introduced me to a friend of his, the editor of the Daily Mirror, or something. I got an invitation from a PRO – I thought it was a press party. Nigel was explaining it all to me – he said he just wanted me to hear the other side.’ His speech was blurred, his manner belligerent. Annie planned to get away soon.
Meanwhile, she asked, ‘What did you think?’
‘I know the other side. I present it. My job,’ he explained.
‘Good, then,’ Annie said, trying to move away.
But she was trapped by the fireplace and Ben Gathercole leaned towards her. ‘I miss her,’ he said earnestly. ‘You don’t know how I miss her. You probably think I’m just a rotten sod who took advantage—’
‘Oh, God, Ben, I don’t care,’ she said. ‘You did it, didn’t you? Spare me your maudlin explanations—’
‘Don’t call me maudlin,’ he began in a maudlin tone.
‘Annie!’ said a voice behind her.
‘Hallo, Veronica,’ Annie said, without much enthusiasm. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m trying to tell you,’ Ben went on, ‘that I can’t stand it, not seeing her.’
‘Tell her, Ben,’ pleaded Annie. ‘Not me. I’ve got my own problems to solve.’
Veronica Stern, a schoolfriend of Annie’s, looked at Ben’s drunken face with distaste. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I must tell you, Annie, about Jane. Jane North.’
Annie said, ‘I’ve got to go for a pee, Veronica,’ and pushed through the crowd. Upstairs she had to wait outside the lavatory until a man in a white suit speaking on a cellphone came out. Then she went in, locked the door and sat on the seat for a bit. She heard two people outside. ‘No,’ said a woman, ‘Alexander is Harry Buchanan’s, not Malley’s. He was born after Malley, during Buchanan.’
‘Well, she told me he was Malley’s,’ said a man. ‘Malley’d married Dora by then, but that wasn’t the point.’
‘Never was with Dora, was it?’ the woman said.
Annie pushed the door open and came out. ‘Sorry,’ said the man who’d been outside. Annie spotted Nigel leaning against a picture, talking to someone, and greeted him. He introduced her to a German couple who plainly didn’t want to know her. Annie turned away, deciding she’d take the spiral stairs which led from a corner of the landing down to the small kitchen area Jasmine had created. She remembered a back door and decided to use it to escape this party she was disliking so much. Half-way down the stairs, she looked into the kitchen and saw Tom, his sister Miranda, and the golden hair and very blue eyes she had last seen in a stubbly face peering over Tom’s sheets – John Woodford. She paused for a second, studying the handsome trio, Tom and his sister, tall, long-boned and dark, with identical bright brown eyes and dark hair, and John, with his curly gold hair and broad, classical, Greek-god face. Then, turning, she ran quietly back up the spiral staircase, cursing Jasmine for not bothering to tell her they were coming.
As she went along the landing Sam Anstruther waylaid her. She pushed past him, muttering an excuse, and was half-way down the front staircase, easing her way past two politicians laughing, one clinging to the banisters, and the wife of a merchant banker, famous for her own parties, grimly forging her way up towards the bathroom, when a voice above her cried clearly over the party hubbub, ‘Annie! Please come here.’ She turned to see Jasmine on the landing. Annie, knowing her sister’s expressions and stance by heart, saw that, though she appeared calm, Jasmine was violently upset. Once more she turned and went upstairs, keeping her sister in view all the time. ‘What is it?’ Annie asked urgently.
‘Upstairs,’ Jasmine said in a low voice, turning and heading the way rapidly up another flight. In Jasmine and Nigel’s bedroom there was a smell of scent and cigars. Nigel, his back turned, was leaning against a carved chest which served Jasmine as a dressing table. There was a leather briefcase with a combination lock lying on a red silk dress on the carpet. Jasmine closed the door and leaned against it limply. ‘Oh, Annie,’ she said.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ asked Annie, very alarmed. Nigel put his arm over his eyes and she heard him sob. Jasmine ran to him and embraced him. Annie swiftly locked the door. There’d been very bad news, she saw. Had they heard, in the middle of the party, that Sim was dead? Jasmine, one arm round her husband, turned, with tears in her eyes, ‘It’s Bernard,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh, God, Nigel – I’m so sorry,’ Annie said. ‘What can I do?’
‘We’ve got to ring Mary,’ Jasmine appealed, partly to Nigel, who was obviously so shocked by the news that he hadn’t yet been able to ring his mother. Jasmine led Nigel to the bed, where he sat down burying his head in his hands. ‘Shall I go and explain to everybody?’ she asked.
‘No, no,’ Nigel said.
‘Nigel. We must send them home’ Jasmine told him.
‘Why don’t you two go to Bedford Square?’ Annie suggested. ‘You must ring Nigel’s mother from there. You’ll have to go sooner or later. Pack some things, Jas. Go out through the back door. I can hold on here and wind the party down. I’ll lock up and put the keys through the letterbox.’
As Annie spoke, she was thinking that it would be better in the long run for Nigel to go to the house, see his father’s body and sort out from his father’s desk all the complications which would follow the death. It was only after she had ushered Nigel and Jasmine down the stairs and through the front door, fending off puzzled enquiries from guests startled by the departure of the host and hostess, and flagged down an empty taxi, that she heard Nigel say to Jasmine, in a stunned voice, ‘But what was he doing in Colindale?’
‘I don’t know, darling,’ Jasmine said as he climbed into the taxi. ‘I’ll ring you,’ she said to Annie.
The taxi went off leaving Annie pondering Nigel’s question. If Sir Bernard had died in Colindale, what indeed was he doing in that rather bland northern suburb of London? She went back into the house to speed the guests, most of whom left fairly quickly, though some saw it as an excuse to stay longer, to celebrate life and speculate on death.
‘Did you foresee this one, Max?’ asked one of the guests with apparent scepticism, masking, as Craig knew, adult curiosity and childish superstition.
The astrologer did not reply, but searched out Annie. He told her quietly, ‘I believe Sir Bernard and Nigel were arranging the transfer of his assets to Nigel, Sim having been gone so long. But I don’t think they’d completed matters. You might think it inappropriate to raise the subject now, but I have to warn you there’ll be a muddle.’
‘Yes,’ said Annie perfunctorily. ‘I expect so. Thanks.’
‘I like Nigel and Jasmine,’ he announced, ‘quite apart from the handsome retainer I get from Samco. And I’m pretty disinterested, so if you need advice, feel free to call me.’ He handed her his card and shook her hand saying, in an undertone as if to stress the gravity of the coming situation, ‘There’ll be complications. A scandal.’
17
August
In early August the report of the council committee on the sale of the Savernake Estate and Savernake Park was issued. To the annoyance if not the surprise of Joe Banks, the report concluded that the sale of Savernake was a bad idea. No vote by residents on the question should be permitted. On balance, the report said, the advantages of the seven million pounds to the borough were outweighed by the permanent loss to Kenton of the Savernake area. It severely censured the semi-secret operation preceding the plan.
The report was a nuisance to Joe Banks and his supporters, many of whom had plans for themselves or their families to get something out of the development. But it had been anticipated by Banks and Saver
nake Developments, who had allowed for the possible rejection of their plans by the council. There would follow an already-organised overruling of the council decision by the Department of the Environment, followed by a stepping up of bribes, threats and promises for the estate residents, an intensification of the PR campaign and finally a vote by residents in favour of the sale. However, with what looked like a fight ahead, the last thing Banks and his friends and supporters needed was the unexpected death of Sir Bernard Fellows.
‘Well, I can only say I’m shocked,’ Joe Banks said uneasily to Geoff Doyle, who, through Cindy’s father, the complicitous planning department chief Sam Abbott, had secured a nice contract for building parts of the expensive village-to-be on the Savernake site. Joe Banks had been cornered by Doyle after four days of phone calls, and had agreed to give up part of Sunday afternoon to visit the couple in their town house on Foxwell Hill. Now Banks sat on a cream leather sofa in the long lounge-diner. Double doors gave out on to a patio, and trim green gardens. Cindy, in a tight top and skirt, shook up a cocktail at the drinks bar, poured it out and handed it to him. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ Joe added. He was unhappily aware of Doyle’s physical advantages: he himself was short, overweight and sixty, Doyle was a big muscular, sun-tanned six-foot-two piece of public nuisance, with a dreamy satisfied-looking bimbo and a slightly menacing air. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ Banks said again, ‘and I’ve got to say it creates problems.’
‘That’s the point,’ Doyle said. ‘I’ve been turning away work for the autumn, I’ve taken on extra men and what I’d like is a firm date for the go-ahead.’
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 23
