A Murder in Mayfair (18 page)

The second thing, which perhaps I should have put first, was that I was becoming obsessed with Lucy. She was devastatingly pretty, in spite of being very obviously pregnant. No—not in spite of: because of. I had always found women in pregnancy enormously attractive. When my wife was having ours . . . but perhaps I don't need to go into that. This is not a psychiatric session, though it is in the nature of a confessional one. Having Lucy in the house was like living with an unexploded bomb. I don't pretend she found me in the least attractive. I imagine she regarded me in the nature of a particularly tough nut to practice on. The inevitable happened one day when the children were at school and my wife was at lectures. It continued for two weeks until I was quite sickened by her rampant carnality, terrified of my own growing enslavement to it.

One further thing happened before we rid our house of Lucy. She inevitably had to fetch the children from school from time to time and be alone with them in the house. One evening on a day when this had happened I was putting the children to bed when the eldest, Imogen, said to me: “Lucy must be awfully hard up. She was talking on the phone today about selling something and getting thousands and thousands for it.”

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?”