A Conspiracy of Friends (10 page)

“Your visits are never unwelcome,” replied Geoffrey. And William believed him.

And now here was William opening the door of the car and
letting Freddie de la Hay out after the long journey from London. The dog shot off into the undergrowth bordering the small lawn to the side of the house, giving a bark of delight as he did so. William unloaded his bag from the back seat of the car and walked towards the front door. Underfoot, the gravel made that crunching sound that always delighted him, and reminded him, indeed, when he heard it elsewhere, of here.

Maggie came to greet him, embracing him in the hall, keeping her hands off his jacket, though, as they were covered in flour.

“Pastry,” she explained. “For a pie. For you to take back to London on Sunday.”

“Darling cook,” said William, planting a kiss on her cheek.

“You need feeding up,” said Maggie.

“Do I?”

“Probably not. But I’m making you a Melton Mowbray pie, or an imitation of one now that we can’t call our humble pies by that name any more. Or so Brussels says.”

“It’s the people of Melton Mowbray who say it,” said William. “Not Brussels.”

“I suppose so. They don’t have much else, do they, poor dears? Just their pies.”

He followed her through to the kitchen, leaving his bag on a chair in the hall. Freddie de la Hay was still outside, but clearly remembered the house and would find his own way in once he had finished his preliminary investigations in the bushes.

Maggie dusted her hands on her apron. She was a tall woman, still auburn-haired at forty-six; attractive, thought William, but in the habit of wearing rather old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses that gave her a vaguely scholarly air, like that of a displaced librarian. And she was indeed scholarly, he reminded himself: when Geoffrey had married Maggie she had been a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, writing a doctoral thesis on moral
imagery in the novels of Iris Murdoch. This thesis was never completed, marriage—and life in general—being responsible for many an uncompleted doctorate, but it still lay, a pile of neatly stacked typescript, on a desk in Maggie’s room upstairs. And then, to add to the thesis-inhibiting effect of marriage, there came the distraction of two children, a boy and a girl, both now away from home studying subjects that William could never remember: something to do with product-engineering in one case and psychology in the other.

“Your thesis?” William once asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “Maybe one day.” She paused, looking at him through the steel-rimmed glasses. “I still want to finish it, you know. Oh, I won’t get a degree from it—it’s too late for that. But I do want to complete it.”

“Like my Master of Wine qualification,” said William. “The one I failed. At least you didn’t fail your Ph.D. You just … moved on.”

“You were drunk, weren’t you?”

William shrugged. “That’s the trouble with doing a practical wine exam. You have to taste samples.”

Maggie was sympathetic. “I can understand why you’d like to do it again. Unfinished business—most of us have something we haven’t finished, even if it’s something small, like completing the decoration of a room, or sorting out a cupboard. Small things—small
unfinished
things.”

“How much more Murdoch is there?”

Maggie opened her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “The more I read her,” she said, “the more I discover. Her books are like quarries—you can dig away for as long as you like and keep finding new material, new dimensions to her work. She believed in good, you know. How strange it seems today that anybody should believe in good!”

William had read some of the novels, but not for a long time. He
remembered swimming scenes, for some reason. There was a lot of water, he thought.

“I sometimes wonder,” Maggie went on, “how she would regard me, if she met me now. Would she think that I was a bit of a failure, having spent all that time thinking about her work and then ending up here, raising pigs, making pies in the kitchen …?”

“I don’t think she would,” said William. “I saw a documentary about her once. I remember that, even if I don’t remember the novels very well. She was sitting there, with rather short hair, and her eyes were moving as she spoke, darting about in a tremendously intelligent way. But I thought she seemed very down to earth, very matter of fact. She wouldn’t disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things.”

“Maybe not,” mused Maggie. “If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them.”

“I don’t,” said William. “I never have.”

B
ARBARA
R
AGG SAT
at her desk and looked at the open double page of her diary before her. It was not a busy day, the morning’s only noted commitment being a brief meeting with a publisher at ten-thirty, over a cappuccino in one of the coffee bars which that part of Soho still allowed to flourish among the dubious bars and overpriced restaurants. Barbara was a member of the Ivy Club, some fifteen minutes away in West Street, and the publisher, who was notoriously mean, had angled for an invitation to lunch there, knowing that with a club lunch the member always pays.

“It would be nice to meet for lunch,” he had said. “I’d take you to my club, but it’s closed for renovations. Any suggestions?”

She had smiled. The publisher’s club must have been renovated several times in the course of her dealings with him; perhaps it was like the Forth Bridge, which, until the invention of miracle paints, had needed to be tackled all over again by the time the painting crews reached the far side.

“Your poor club,” she said. “Wasn’t it being renovated earlier this year?”

There had been a pause while the question was assessed. “That was the basement. A new …”

She waited. “Yes?”

“Set of bedrooms.”

She frowned. “That’s strange. It can’t be much fun staying in the basement. Not much natural light, I would have thought. So what are they working on now?”

“Oh, heaven knows. But we can’t go there, I’m afraid.”

She rolled her eyes. “Then let’s have coffee. Ten-thirty?”

So there was that, and then at two o’clock she was expecting a visit from one of her authors who had telephoned to say that he had had an idea. This was all that was in the diary, and neither of these appointments would be remotely stressful. But unrecorded was a further and infinitely more worrying duty: a session with Rupert. It could be put off, but she realised that it would then only prey on her mind. So she closed her eyes, mentally counted to ten, then twenty, then thirty; prevarication enough, she thought, and rose to her feet.

Rupert’s office was down the corridor. While Barbara kept her door open so that any member of the agency’s staff might drop in with a query or for a chat, Rupert’s door policy was distinctly less encouraging. Not only was his door always closed, but there were occasions when, although everybody knew that he was within, he
resolutely refused to answer a knock. “If people want to speak to me,” he once observed, “then they can speak to me about speaking to me. This casual, everybody’s welcome approach is an utter waste of time. Believe me.” This comment was accompanied by a look in Barbara’s direction—a look that she intercepted and met with a challenging stare.

“Saying ‘believe me’ all the time is a sign of insecurity,” Barbara had observed to one of her colleagues. “You say it because you doubt that anybody’s going to believe you. And why should nobody believe you?”

“Because you tell so many lies,” said the colleague.

“I didn’t say that,” said Barbara, and laughed, adding: “Believe me.”

Now, standing in front of Rupert’s door, she drew a deep breath and knocked firmly. There was no reply, and so she knocked once more. Again there was no answer.

She took another deep breath and tested the handle. The door was not locked. She pushed it open.

Rupert was sitting back in his chair, his feet on his desk. He was reading a manuscript, which he barely lowered as Barbara came in.

“I wish you’d knock, Barbara,” he said from behind the manuscript. “It doesn’t take much effort, you know.”

“I did,” she said. “Twice.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t hear you. I could have been on the phone, you know. It might not have been convenient.”

“Well, you weren’t,” she said briskly. “Which was most fortunate, as I need to have a word with you, Rupert.”

Rupert lowered the manuscript and took his feet off the desk. “Fine,” he drawled. “My door is always open. Metaphorically, of course. What can I do for you, dear R—Barbara?”

Barbara knew that he referred to her as Ragg, or la Ragg, but it rarely slipped out in her presence. She drew up the chair beside his desk and sat down.

“It’s about the flat.”

His manner changed immediately: he was now all solicitude. “Of course. Have you decided on a date? You know that we’ll be happy to do anything to help you. I’m even prepared to shift furniture, you know—an alternative to going to the gym. Really. Yes, I really am.”

She shook her head. “No. There’s not going to be a date, Rupert. I’ve decided to keep the flat after all. I’m so sorry to have raised your hopes, but I know that you’ll understand.”

For a moment Rupert said nothing. She watched his face, though, and saw the colour rise. Rupert had always been like a piece of litmus paper, she thought, his complexion revealing his emotional state with immediate and striking clarity.

“So,” he said at last. “You’re going to break your promise to me. Just like that. Pouf! Promise gone.”

“It wasn’t exactly a promise, Rupert,” said Barbara mildly. “As I recall, all I said was that I had decided to sell the flat and you could buy it. Your ability to buy it was dependent on my initial decision to sell, and relied on that. When my decision changed, your interest fell away.”

Rupert’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t you come the hair-splitting scholastic theologian with me, Ragg,” he shouted. “You promised, and you’re now going to break your promise. Fine. That shows me what sort of partner I’ve got. My father was right. He warned me that no Ragg could be trusted. That’s what he said, you know. He said you were as unreliable as gypsies.”

“That’s a shocking thing to say, Rupert. Are you saying that gypsies are unreliable? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I didn’t say they were unreliable, I said that
you
Raggs were unreliable.”

“You didn’t. I heard you, Rupert. You said that gypsies were unreliable. You can’t say things like that these days, you know. It’s insulting.”

He stared at her venomously. “What do you know about gypsies, Barbara? Nothing, that’s what!”

“So you’re the big expert on gypsies, Rupert? Like so many other things.”

He looked away. “I’m going to get even with you, Barbara, I promise you. And just you remember: I, unlike some I could name, keep my promises.” He paused. “There’s something you should perhaps know, Barbara. You interested? Well, since you started this, I might tell you. My father knew more about your father than you do. Yes, it’s true. And you know what? He told me that your grandfather was a gypsy. He never told
you
that, did he? Well, he told Pop, and Pop told me. So you should go away and think about that little bit of information, Barbara!”

B
ARBARA
R
AGG MANAGED
to meet the publisher for coffee at ten-thirty as planned, but only just. She had thought all along that her conversation with Rupert would not be easy, but she had not imagined that it would be quite as uncomfortable as this, and she had certainly not anticipated that Rupert would make a disclosure as to the identity of her grandfather. She left his office reeling. Outside in the corridor, she turned first one way, then the other. She looked up. There was the office accountant, staring at her anxiously.

The accountant, a thin woman with a permanently worried expression, reached out to touch Barbara’s arm. “Is everything all right, Barbara? You look a bit upset.”

“I’m fine. It’s just that I’ve exchanged a few words with Rupert, and …”

“Oh, I know what it’s like talking to him. Impossible.” Her hand shot to her mouth. “Sorry. Didn’t mean that.”

Barbara reassured her, but her manner was distracted. “No, don’t apologise. Rupert is … Well, we all have our ways.”

The accountant gave a weak smile. “We need to gang together,” she whispered. “We women need to stand up to him. It’s the only way with bullies.”

Barbara nodded. “Do you think it felt like this during the Battle of Britain?”

“Of course it did,” said the accountant. “It must have been like this every minute of the day. And they stood up to the bullies, didn’t they? Those young men—half of them barely out of short trousers; they stood up against the bullies.”

The accountant patted Barbara’s arm and went on her way. Barbara, still dazed, returned to her room and sat down heavily in her chair. I have gypsy blood, she thought. Rom. Traveller. Whatever it’s called these days—that’s me.
That’s me
.

There was no doubt in her mind that what Rupert had said was correct. Her grandfather on her father’s side had died some years before her birth, as had his wife, her grandmother. It was not until she was about eight that she had started to ask her father about his parents—questions brought on by the conversation of coevals at school who saw their grandparents regularly.

“What happened to your parents?” she asked directly. “They’re my grandparents, aren’t they?”

Gregory Ragg had looked away. “They died, darling. Terribly sad, but there we are. Went to heaven.”

He did not seem to wish to continue the conversation, but she persisted. “Where did they live?”

He had sounded a bit vague. “Here and there. They moved about a bit.”

Now, remembering this exchange all these years later, her father’s
words came back to her.
They moved about a bit
. Of course they did: that’s what travellers did—they travelled.

“So what did Granddad do for a living? Was he a literary agent, like you?”