A murder in mayfair, p.19
A Murder in Mayfair, page 19
He gestured toward the cottage. I stopped by the car.
“I bought some provisions in the village. Matthew said they would be welcome.”
“They will, they will. I hope you’ve got some bread. I can make my own, but it’s very hard on my old hands. People are very good about getting things up to me, but you can’t expect them to come more than once a week or ten days, can you? Leave them a moment. Nobody’s going to break into your car and steal them.”
He led the way through the door and into the one living room of the cottage. It smelled strongly of the peat fire which smoldered away in the open fireplace against the far wall. The furniture was old, smacking of the secondhand shop—a small table with two unrelated chairs, an armchair and a little sofa, a gas lamp, a bookcase—small but nearly full. My father filled a kettle from a jug of water and put it on the hob, then went about preparing a cup of tea. I was conscious that if I had volunteered to help him I wouldn’t have known what to do, without electricity or gas.
“I think, you know, it’s best if you just call me George. Everyone calls me that. It’s not a common name in southern Ireland—too Hanoverian I suppose. I’ve told them in the village I’m expecting a visit from a relative, but if you call me Uncle George you’ll involve yourself in a lie, and so often one sinks deeper and deeper in, doesn’t one?”
“Yes. But politicians never learn.”
He looked at me sharply.
“Odd you should be a politician. Though perhaps not, because I never was, really. Not giving my heart and soul to the cause, or letting it dominate my waking thoughts. Can’t offhand remember how I slipped into it, but I think it was someone suggesting my name for the Worthing constituency. So much of life is pure accident, isn’t it? Shall I call you Colin?”
“Please.”
“Nice name. I like it.”
“I don’t know what surname you use. I should have asked Matthew.”
“It’s Green. I wanted something anonymous, something that didn’t stand out.”
“Of course. . . . I didn’t slip into politics by accident, by the by. I pushed my way into it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do—or thought I wanted to. But it was accident I got such good parents, and I’m grateful for it.”
“Good, good. . . .” His lined old face was troubled. “I gather from Matthew you had a twin, who wasn’t so lucky.”
“No.”
“It’s very sad. I wish there was something I could do. . . . Sometimes I feel so helpless and useless.”
“Kettle’s boiling,” I said cheerfully.
The tea when it came was without milk. I had some in the car, but it seemed to be how my father preferred it, or maybe how he thought it ought to be served. He reached up to a high shelf and took down an old biscuit tin and two tea plates. He offered me some homemade oat cakes. When I bit into one it tasted like a particularly brutal kind of blotting paper. I wondered if he had made them, or if they were a tribute from a friend in the village. I could imagine him having female admirers—similarly old, but attracted by his manner and his gentleness.
“What do you do in your spare time?” he asked.
“At the moment I have very little. Though I have been going into my origins as you know.” He nodded, looking down at the floor. “When I was an ordinary MP, just occasionally Opposition spokesman, I went to the theater and the opera a lot.”
“Ah. Yes, I once enjoyed that. You don’t fish?”
I wished it was something my other father had taught me, though probably he had never done it himself. It would have made a fanciful bond between my two fathers.
“No, I don’t fish. I’ve never had much chance to. I’d rather like to learn.”
“It’s a form of meditation for me. Perhaps it could help you, too. People in politics always need something to relax them—to be always politicking is dangerous. I warn you—I’m not one of your great fishermen who boast of their enormous catches. It’s just a background to thinking, and of course a source of food. It’s what I most enjoy eating. The differences between fish are so much more subtle than those between meats.”
“Perhaps you could take me tomorrow and show me how.”
“I’d like that very much,” he said, with a warm smile. “I would be proud if I could say I’d introduced you to a quiet form of relaxation. Opera is too much like the House of Commons.”
After our tea we had a walk in what was left of the light. The landscape was grand with a touch of monotony, and empty. Always that emptiness. I was touched by a vision of my father as almost the only effort at human habitation in all that loneliness. He asked me a lot about my upbringing, and I told him about Claud and Elizabeth, how they had longed for a baby, how generous and loving and protective they had been, how I had given a new meaning to their lives and how they had given themselves to the business of making my life good and fulfilling. He told me a little about his own childhood, but that meant mostly about prep school and Eton.
“It’s an odd sort of upbringing,” he said, in his gentle, uncomplaining voice. “I don’t think any other country sends away its children like that, do they? Unless they’ve caught it from us in some of the old Empire places. Even when I was at home I barely saw my father or mother. In the holidays they arranged a series of treats, but they never came with us. Wouldn’t you have thought they would have wanted to? I realize now—because now I have time, and now I can think things through—that I had all those strong feelings and affections and no one—just no one—to fix them on.”
We were straying near forbidden territory. In the dying light I looked into his face and decided I should retreat rather than advance.
“Do you have friends here?” I asked. “In the village?”
“Oh yes: we’re a wonderful little community really, and we all know each other. I go down shopping when I need to, sometimes have a drink in the bar, and they come up with things, or if they haven’t time leave them at the end of the land, by the roadside. They know I’ll potter down there every other day or so, and find them. That’s my world now. I don’t want a wider one. I have no idea of the name of your boss, the Prime Minister—nor the name of the Irish Prime Minister either, come to that. They don’t matter to me. They probably matter to far fewer people than they imagine they do. It’s very good for you to have your world contracted to such a little scope. Much easier for you to aim at serenity.”
When we got back to the cottage he lit the gas lamp and cooked on the fire two fish that he’d caught that morning, which we ate with boiled potatoes and carrots. Then we had rice pudding from a tin. We had instant coffee afterward, and later on an Irish whiskey. We steered off forbidden topics, and I told him about Susan, and why things had gone wrong between us. Only at bedtime, which was very early, did anything disturb the atmosphere. He insisted that I must have the bed, and he would sleep in blankets on the floor. I protested that I was a young man, I could sleep anywhere, and he said it was what he always did when his children came to visit. When I saw that it was beginning to distress him I gave in, and watched him put on his pajamas and pull a bundle of rough blankets around him.
Lying there in bed in the darkness I looked at the shape he made against the wall in the little room and it made me think of him as a holy man, the abbot of a very small establishment, maybe one who, as his flock had died or one by one made their way back into the world, had attained a greater peace on his own.
When I had finished shaving next day in a bowl of hot water, I went into the other room and found the fire lit, or perhaps revived from the day before, and eggs being boiled and bread toasted on the end of a fork. It felt like being a schoolboy again, but pleasantly so. My mother had always insisted that you mustn’t start the day on an empty stomach, and I never did, though I quite often do now. Sitting at table, breaking the tops off my eggs and cutting my toast into soldiers, I noticed two rods had already been selected and were by the door beside a large wooden box.
“My bag of tricks,” my father explained. “You would really like to do a bit of fishing, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d love to—unless there’s something in the way of provisions you need me to fetch in the Land Rover.”
“Provisions? You’ve brought enough to last me a month!”
When we set off I didn’t volunteer to drive. Probably the car couldn’t have got within miles, and in any case it seemed as if selecting the right spot for the weather and the season and then walking there was part of the pleasure. The going was rough, as all the going for acres around was rough, but after about three miles we came to a patch of rich green on the banks of the river Feale, and here we settled, selected our bait, and the man I called George gave me loving and earnest tuition in the first stages.
It was only after two or three hours, much of it spent in companionable silence or in the passing on of basic tips, that we talked at all in the usual sense. The fish seemed remarkably uninterested in our advances to them, but I didn’t comment on this because I sensed this was part of the process. I was always careful what I said, because I intended absolutely to stick to my word and not pump him for painful details. So I just said:
“This must be one of the most peaceful spots on earth.”
“I think it is.”
“Idyllic, but almost empty.”
“It’s idyllic because it’s almost empty. We should get over the feeling that man is an essential part of a landscape.”
That put a new shine on my meditations about emptiness. But I thought he was probably speaking personally as well.
“I suppose so,” I said. “Is that what made you choose it?”
“I don’t think I did anything so positive as choose it. . . . You’d like to hear how I came to disappear so completely, wouldn’t you?”
“Only if you want to tell me,” I said humbly. “And only what you want to tell me.”
“There’s nothing painful about that, and nobody that could be hurt now. That’s not true—or I don’t know it’s true—about . . . the other business. It’s a matter of wonder to me—always has been—that no one guessed before, how it came about. That night . . . after I’d left Upper Brook Street . . . I walked and walked the streets for some time—an hour, two hours. Then at some stage I found myself—literally, because I hardly knew what I was doing—near my brother’s flat by Holland Park.”
“Your brother’s!”
“Yes.” He looked into my face, and saw that I’d heard about his brother. “I don’t know why anyone should be surprised by that. When I came a little to myself and realized where I was, I had to make a decision: was I going to give myself up, or was I going to try to disappear.”
“But . . . but everyone says—”
“That Bertie was so ineffectual, did nothing with his life, that we weren’t close? That’s true enough, except perhaps the last. You know, when you grow up in a household where the usual close parent-child bond doesn’t operate, and where you’re sent away to pretty fearsome schools, the younger generation has to stick pretty closely together because their brothers or sisters are all they’ve got. I hadn’t much in common with Bertie, that’s true, but in fact in all the early years we were very close.”
I considered that, in the slow, contemplative way that the life here seemed to induce.
“I can understand that,” I said, “at least now you’ve explained it I can. But it seems rather pointless to go to him, when he was by all accounts so ineffectual.”
“You’ve forgotten the crucial fact about him.”
“What’s that?”
“That he was a homosexual. At a time when practicing homosexuals were prosecuted and imprisoned.”
“I’m sorry. I’m being thick. I still don’t see—”
“Don’t worry. It’s a world away, from what I can judge, sitting my life out here in this wonderful wilderness. There’s no reason why someone who has grown up in a different moral climate should understand. This persecution of homosexuals was intermittent: for months, years even, nothing much would be done, then some rule-bound little jackanapes at Scotland Yard or in the Home Office would decide on a big swoop, or the arrest of a high-profile victim to encourage others to lie low. The consequence of this was that there was a well-established machine for getting people out of the country when the authorities began to get active. Often the person who would be ‘vanished’ was the boyfriend of a high-profiled person who’d been targeted, someone who might be bullied or tricked into giving evidence against him. Without evidence, no prosecution. The boyfriend could either be got to a bolt-hole in the country, or in especially important cases they could be spirited out of the country: to the Continent, to some country where homosexuality was not illegal, to the States, to Ireland.”
“I see. So you went to your brother—”
“I knocked him up in the middle of the night, him and his boyfriend of the moment, told him . . . about it, and he was immediately on the phone. By dawn I was in a car speeding to Wales, by the time the news broke in the country as a whole I was on a fishing boat on the way to Ireland—to the Republic of Ireland, of course.”
“That was the place you chose?”
He shook his head.
“Not really. I’d always liked Ireland. The family still had some property here, though not a good deal, and so I’d been several times with the children. We still have it, and it’s the excuse for Matthew and Caroline to come over. It’s a long way from here, in County Wexford . . . but of course—”
“That’s right. I was there last night.”
“You would be. Silly of me. It serves its purpose better by being pretty distant from here. No, though I’m fond of the country, Ireland chose me: I could get into the country pretty easily without going through any passport control or customs. We landed in a tiny fishing village in the South, I was picked up, and in no time I was on my way to my bolt-hole in Limerick.”
“Did you literally go into hiding? Go to earth?”
“Almost literally. Never went out except in the dark, and so on. I was the guest of the Catholic Church, unbeknown to it. My host was a dignitary, very highly regarded, and if they knew about his activities in respect of less serious criminals, they kept quiet about it. The laws against homosexuality were quite as Draconian here as in Britain, but of course it went on, and sometimes it was winked at. The Church, in particular, did a lot of winking. I believe my host was a holy man, but without the gift of chastity. I know he wrestled with his failing, but I think he wrestled knowing he would lose. A lot of people do, and not just silly, self-deluded people. I knew his habits. I’m quite sure his activities never involved children. I would have found that intolerable. In fact, at that time he was my only friend.”
“But were there no questions, with all the hue and cry going on in Britain?”
“They were two countries wide apart then. America was closer. They’ve been forced together a bit since. There were no questions because hardly a soul knew about me. My friend’s housekeeper was told I was a Catholic Englishman who had suffered a nervous breakdown. She was a comfortable body who hardly did more than pass the time of day with me. My friend and I prayed together, we talked, endlessly. He is the only person I have talked with about . . . Anyway, at the end of that time, when the hue and cry had died down a bit, when attention had shifted to poor old John Profumo, a very much lesser sinner, we had to decide what I was to do with myself.”
He paused, and in the silence I gently said: “And you chose the greatest possible solitude and seclusion.”
“Yes. I couldn’t consider any kind of monastic institution—for many reasons, not least the difficulty and danger for them. In any case I was not then of the Catholic faith, though I am now. My Irish host knew of this place, and Bertie arranged the buying of it—for quite a small sum, in cash. I came here with a new name, looking I think ten years older than any picture anyone had seen of me in the newspapers, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“Forging the right lifestyle for yourself.”
His gentle eyes twinkled.
“You use expressions I wouldn’t use. How pretentious language has become! But I think you’re right, if I understand it. I had to find a way of life that . . . suited. Not suited me, but suited my situation, my state, what I had done. I can see why anyone—even you, if you were not such a gentle person—might feel I should have gone to jail, paid for what happened, even hanged, because people were hanged at that time. I had to have a way of life that showed—not to the world, but to myself—that I understood such feelings, even shared them. I think probably I have failed in that.”
“Because your way of life is so good?”
He looked at me appreciatively.
“Yes. You are very perceptive. It is so good—far, far better than anything I ever knew before. It was hard at first, not because it was lonely—loneliness was what I needed above all else—but because I had to learn to do everything, and learn on my own, from my mistakes. Now anything else would be hard—impossible, in fact. I dislike the traffic in the village—I, a Londoner! I’m a creature of silence, and the open, but it’s no longer a punishment. It’s a gift.”
That seemed to be the moment to stop. By coincidence the fish began to give signs that their sluggish curiosity had been aroused by the bright goodies we had been dangling in front of them for hours, though they were still inclined to tease and swim away.
“They’re like stay-at-home voters,” I said, watching a departing tail. “You work your guts out to get them to the polling station, and then as like as not they spoil their ballot papers or vote for the other chap.”
But an hour later we had caught a meal for ourselves, my contribution being a modest-sized but succulent-looking trout. I slit its throat with qualms, but I knew that if I’d had a few more days at it, I’d have done it quite unthinkingly.
As we were packing up to start back home, I took up the subject of his disappearance again.
“I don’t think you should blame yourself because your life here is so good, George. The instinct to punish yourself is not very healthy.”
