A murder in mayfair, p.14
A Murder in Mayfair, page 14
Lucy had settled down thoroughly in the house, I knew her bedroom, I was sure she had no possession which could fetch anything like a thousand pounds. Except what she had in her womb. She could not have been talking to Elizabeth, your mother, who’d been at work that afternoon. In any case the bargain there had been struck. Whatever was happening I wanted no part of it.
My wife was something close to a saint, but she was no holy fool. She already suspected what had been going on. She found a bed-sitter in a house with an older fellow-student of history, and we moved Lucy there smartly, overruling all her objections. She became extremely peevish, I remember. When I helped her up to the room with her cases and ignored her disparagement of it, I said goodbye. I never saw her again, though I heard of her.
That is all I have to say of a personal nature. There may be other things I can tell you—I do not know, of course, just how much you know. You probably, a young man, regard my shame at the episode as slightly comic. I can only say the relationship with Lucy left me feeling soiled, and above all my marriage was never quite the same again. My dear wife, who died last year, never upbraided me on the subject, in fact we never talked about it. But it was always there—between us, between me and my children. It is here with me now. I hope when we meet we can talk about it as little as necessary.
Yours sincerely,
Simon Frere
The letter, inevitably, was much in my thoughts in the next few days. I rang Professor Frere and arranged to meet in a Chinese restaurant close to King’s Cross Station. I knew it well, and knew it was little frequented at lunchtime. Meanwhile the story haunted me, not so much for what it told me about Lucy Mariotti as for what it told me about my parents—how very far they were willing to act out of character and convictions in order to secure the child they longed for.
I used my official car to get to our meeting. My driver looked disapproving. The King’s Cross area, decrepit and riddled with prostitution, had proved near-fatal to the reputation of at least one member of the previous government. Certainly it’s an area with few charms. Perhaps the opening of the new British Library will help to clear the locality up. Then again, it could make it worse.
In the street where the Silken Road is situated a middle-class person sticks out like a sore thumb. I was on the pavement giving directions to my driver when to return for me when an elderly man, small, trim of figure, in smart sports jacket and flannels, came along from the library direction. My driver (a conventional soul, as most of the drivers are) looked relieved it was a man I was meeting. The man guessed as I had guessed on the same basis, and we greeted each other like exiles in an outlandish foreign country. Then we dived into the ill-lit and depressing chinoiserie of the Silken Road.
“The food really is rather good,” I said apologetically.
“It was considerate of you to choose somewhere so close to the library,” he said, trying to sound at ease. “I can go back for an afternoon’s work.”
We took the menu, merely glanced at it, and ordered. Food was not what we had come for, nor drink. As the waiter drifted off Simon Frere sat back in his chair and looked at me.
“Let me just ask you before we start: you discovered recently that you were adopted?”
“That’s right.”
“So your parents—they’re dead, are they?—never told you.”
“No, they didn’t. My mother’s dead, my father is fairly far advanced into senility.”
“I see. How sad. Your mother was such a nice woman, and though I didn’t know your father well, what I did know I respected. But I feel they should have told you: it’s unusual not to these days. You said on the phone you didn’t want to blame—”
“No blame at all,” I interrupted hurriedly. “I had a happy childhood and a very secure one. It was rather a shock to learn from your letter that I was bought, but in an odd way that increases my respect for them. They were brilliant parents.”
He nodded, as if relieved but unsurprised.
“I’m happy to hear that. So good did come out of it in the long run. Yes, that does put my mind at rest. . . . What happened was really quite simple, and my part in it may have been dubious legally, but morally I have to say I had no problems with it. I was quite young at the time and I was acting professor, standing in for someone who had had what was then a revolutionary brain operation and was out of action for two years. Your mother had been the departmental secretary for six or seven years. Her longing for a child was well known. I well remember the day she and Claud were knocked back as potential adoptive parents.”
“Because of my father’s mild epilepsy, I believe.”
“That’s right. It was a devastating blow for her—for both of them, I’m sure. Elizabeth was the only one I knew at that point. I’ve never seen a woman more bowled over by anything other than a death.”
At that moment the piled dishes were put on the little heater, hot plates were put in front of us, and we helped ourselves to bits of this and that. We bent our heads over our plates to eat, though neither of us, I suspect, would have noticed or minded if no food or drink had been brought along at all.
“Just to go off on to a side issue for a moment,” I said, to start the conversation up again. “I understand it was too late for Lucy to have an abortion, at least safely. Did she give any sign that she’d investigated the usual abortion channels?”
“No.” Simon Frere’s mouth twisted into an expression of distaste. “She wanted money, lots of it.” He sipped at his wine, probably as a pretext for delay. When he spoke again I felt sure I was going to hear everything he knew. “I said I had no moral qualms about what I did, and that’s true, of the initial stage. But it occurs to me I did keep myself prissily remote from the later stages, when I’d learned money was involved. I washed my hands of the business, and I can’t be proud of that. If you were to ask me—to put it brutally—how much you fetched, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.” He sighed. “As much as she could get, no doubt.”
“I wonder what the market rate was for assuaging emotional desperation,” I remarked. “When did all this happen? How long after the murder?”
“Some time in April she came to us, about five weeks after the murder, if I remember rightly. Once the police were satisfied she and Lord John were not in it together, and she no longer had any contact with him or knew where he was, they let her go, though they took her passport away. Not that she ever showed any desire to go back to Australia. They also cautioned her not to speak to the press, so as not to prejudice any future trial.”
“When you found out she wanted to give the baby away, did you try to persuade her to go through the usual channels?”
“No, I should have but—”
“You thought of my mother?”
“Yes. I suppose you think I was playing God. Perhaps there was some element of that in it.”
“You did explain to my parents who it was who was having this baby—someone notorious in the murder inquiry?”
“Most certainly, and who the father was. It would have been dishonest not to. They took the view that the parentage was immaterial, that any other view was medieval.” He looked me straight in the eye. “That was the only time I really talked to your father, and I liked him so much, and respected him, too. I thought the baby would have a wonderful start in life with parents like that.”
“I did. None better.”
“And then I . . . pretty well washed my hands of things, as I say. They were so happy, you see. The sight of your mother rid me of any doubts I might have had. I set up a meeting for them with Lucy to sort out the details, and felt that my involvement was at an end.”
“But it wasn’t, I suppose.”
“Not entirely. Soon after the meeting I heard that your father had applied for a job in the Midlands. I assumed things were settled, as Lucy had told me they were. When I heard there was money involved I was horrified and worried, but I thought your parents could probably afford the sort of sum Lucy would be likely to be asking.”
“I suppose there’s no need to follow up Lucy’s attempt to find a higher bidder for me, since obviously nothing came of it.”
Professor Frere shifted in his seat, and put his fork down, having done little more than toy with his food.
“It’s not quite as simple as that.”
“Oh?”
I put down my chopsticks and gestured to the underemployed waiter for coffee.
“Later in the evening when my daughter mentioned Lucy trying to sell something Lucy told me she’d talked to Professor Marryott—Patrick Marryott, professor at my former department at University College, London. He was a faintly—no, decidedly—insalubrious man. She just dropped it into the conversation, but the implication was she was thinking of doing her thesis with him.”
“Would that have worried you?”
“I was nearing the end of my . . . physical relationship with her, and I think by and large I’d have been delighted to be rid of her. But Imogen’s talk about selling worried me very much. For your parents’ sake primarily, but feeling revolted by the general sordidness and cupidity of it, I decided to call Marryott and see if anything was going on I ought to know about. He was avuncular, condescending, and when I asked if he was involved in any attempt to find parents for Lucy’s baby he laughed and said he might be. What business was it of mine? I said it was very much my business because parents had been found here for the child and an agreement entered into.”
“I suppose the trouble with agreements like that,” I said thoughtfully, “is that being illegal they can be broken with impunity because the injured party couldn’t go to the police or a lawyer.”
“Exactly. Marryott said it was Lucy’s baby and she could give it to whomever she wanted to give it to—my people, who sounded as dull as ditchwater, pretty much like myself, or the Hayden-Gryces if they were whom she preferred, or they were the ones who were offering the most money. And then I really got worried.”
“Pretty unmistakable name. Why were you worried? Did you know them?”
“Yes, I knew them well. He was a professor of History, she a lecturer in Art. Childless, and blessedly so, but rich—a private income. The last people you’d entrust a baby to. Neurotic, perpetually rowing, frankly in his case on the verge of insanity. I was horrified.”
“You’d got yourself into an ethical dilemma.”
He smiled wryly.
“You think me a bit of a prig. But I’m glad you can see how I viewed the situation. I was in a moral quandary. Suddenly the clean hands you thought you had don’t seem so spotless anymore. I agonized. I had a strong suspicion that if I talked to Lucy she’d laugh in my face. But the thought of having involved your parents in a situation where they were likely to suffer such heartbreak was intolerable. I told Marryott he had to put a stop to this: it was about as honest and edifying as a slave auction. He told me that this was Lucy’s business, and it wasn’t for either of us to interfere. When I said the Hayden-Gryces were thoroughly unsuitable parents he said I was being judgmental as usual and it was time I stopped playing God. I began to get angry, and he said: ‘Look, Simon, you’re in this up to your ears. If you want to ruin a promising career all you have to do is make a fuss and that will be the end of you in academic life.’ I still wonder if I did the right thing.”
“Did you contemplate warning my parents?”
“Yes. That was really the only alternative, wasn’t it, and I did think long and hard about it. But in the end I didn’t know what Lucy was intending, and warning them would have the same devastating effect as denying them the longed-for baby would if that’s what turned out to be Lucy’s decision. In the end I was a coward. I did nothing, as Marryott knew that I would.”
“And Lucy?”
“By then she was in her bed-sitter, neither my wife nor I saw any more of her, or wanted to know any of her business—beyond that she’d honored her agreement with your parents.”
“Do you think they knew she was negotiating with others?”
“No, I’m sure they didn’t. They couldn’t have hidden their apprehension. I expect she was aiming to have the child and then go in for some sort of Dutch auction. Frankly, there’s nothing so sordid or insensitive that I would think Lucy incapable of it.”
“So is that what you think happened?”
He shot me a sharp look.
“I wondered whether you knew. Since you’d found out so much about your natural mother I thought you would have learned this, too.”
“Learned what?”
“Lucy Mariotti had twins.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Getting Serious
How did you know?” I asked at last, my mind having in the silence since his news broke conducted a swift rearrangement of my mental landscape. “Did Lucy tell you?”
He shook his head vigorously.
“I told you I never saw or spoke to Lucy after she moved out of our house. No, it was your mother who told me. She’d resigned from her job, but she came to see me the day before she and Claud and the baby moved to Milton. The baby, of course, was a deadly secret, but I knew, and though I could see she begrudged me the ten minutes she spent away from him—you—to come to see me and thank me, she did acknowledge that I’d earned it, and I was happy to see her. She said you had transformed their lives, and I’m sure that was true. In fact, you could see it. I was surprised none of her colleagues in the office commented on the fact that she was a changed woman.”
“Why did she mention Lucy having had twins?”
“I suppose because Lucy had. When she handed you over she told them, and added: ‘Luckily I had a would-be parent in reserve.’ Your mother was quite indignant. ‘Did she think we were going to go back on the agreement?’ she asked. ‘It’s the last thing we would have done. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.’”
“My poor mother,” I said, going over in my mind examples of her beautiful naïveté about the wickednesses of the world. “She would never have been able to comprehend what Lucy had actually been contemplating doing.”
“No, your mother always thought the best of people if that was possible. Though I remember her saying too, that last time I saw her: ‘I wish she’d offered us both the boys, because I wouldn’t trust her to be sure she’d found a really suitable home for the other little one.’ All this was said sotto voce in my office in the English Department, with both of us behaving like gunpowder plotters.”
I thought for a moment.
“Is that all the evidence there is for my being a twin? Because she could have been making it up—a nasty joke to twist the knife in a little.”
He’d lived with this much longer than me, and thought it through.
“Oh, I don’t think so. The fact of her having two is the only explanation for her not having tried to get more out of your mother and father. I’m sure she was intending to do that, but the second baby meant she could double the sum anyway. And Patrick Marryott mentioned it too, fairly obliquely. We met at a conference somewhere or other, and though I’d very much rather not have talked to him, he came up during the coffee break one morning. ‘Wasn’t Lucy a clever girl?’ he said in his usual sneering way. ‘Solved all the problems and maximized her profits without burdening your old-fashioned Liberal conscience.’ ‘All the problems except the babies’,’ I said. He shrugged. ‘Oh, they’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Children with their natural parents often have far worse prospects of happiness.’ Which was true, but totally irrelevant. I always felt strongly about that. When Hayden-Gryce’s death was in the papers—in the late seventies it was—I thought, ‘Well, that’s one of them out of the way who will have made his life hell.’ I asked Marryott if Lucy was working at her research with him, and he said: ‘Oh no. She’s pursuing her researches in quite a different field.’ ‘What field is that?’ I asked. He chuckled. The same field as the respected Dr. Kinsey,’ he replied, and the chuckle turned into a roar of laughter and he went off.”
“Who is or was Dr. Kinsey?” I asked.
“You’re too young to remember the fuss his books stirred up soon after the war,” Simon Frere said. “I think the best word to describe him is ‘sexologist.’ I took him to mean that she was using her undoubted charms and attractions—maybe as someone’s mistress. A rich person’s definitely.”
“That sounds pretty likely.”
Simon Frere had put down his cup, refused a refill, and had begun to make preparations for departure. The restaurant was still sparsely filled, and our table was remote from any other diners, which had made our talk much easier.
“I won’t say I’ve enjoyed our session,” Frere said, “but it has been therapeutic. On the other hand I don’t think I’ll want to go back over the events we’ve talked about too much in the future. I was at least cured of any desire to play God by them, or try to cure the miseries of this mortal coil. I don’t think I come at all well out of things, and I’d rather put them behind me. The ball is now in your court, and it’s up to you whether you decide to play it or not.”
“Personally I’m very glad you did try to cure the miseries of this mortal coil,” I said.
“But remember you could have been the one who was sold to the Hayden-Gryces. Now, is there anything else you want to ask me about? Then I can put it all behind me, as I’m afraid I put you behind me thirty-five years ago.”
I thought.
“I’ve always been puzzled why Lucy didn’t have an abortion the moment she found out she was pregnant. That would have been perfectly possible then, wouldn’t it, even if it was illegal?”
“Perfectly possible, particularly with the Revill connections. She would hardly have needed to go backstreet to get rid of Lord John’s child. Actually, I did ask her.”
“What did she say?”
“Said she couldn’t contemplate it because she was a Catholic.”
“Hmm. Did you believe her?”
“I did not. It was the sort of tricky, dishonest thing she would say, daring you to scoff and then putting you down. I think the baby was a weapon she could use against Lord John—either to get money or marriage or whatever out of him, or to get him bad publicity. Of course after the murder the police were investigating her for some time, and she certainly couldn’t have done anything illegal in that time. Probably by the time she was cleared in their eyes the possibility of a safe abortion no longer existed. Lucy certainly wouldn’t have done anything that might have involved risk to herself.”
