A Murder in Mayfair (21 page)

“I bet you were in his first batch.”

“Top of the list. Half of that fucking
ethos
lecture was addressed to me. If I'd had any sense I'd have opened my legs and said, ‘Hello, good-bye,' to that damned thing of his and had done with it. That's what all the others did, except for those who kicked him in the relevant part and got bad marks for their pains. Instead of which I took it as a challenge. I'd got to get a ring and a white wedding. Have you ever heard anything more daft? Well, I was punished for it. What is that thing at the end of
Vanity Fair
? ‘Which of us—'”

“‘Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?'” The question suddenly struck me with the force of a wet towel across my head. It was relevant to her, but it was just as relevant to me. I could hardly restrain myself from going out into the
fresh air and analyzing what it was about the quote that bore so strongly home. My parents had got what they desired, a child, and in spite of Thackeray they had been satisfied—joyful, grateful, fulfilled. I had got what I desired, political office, and I was not satisfied. In fact I was so little satisfied I was haring off on the track of my birth and origins to hide from myself the emptiness of my life. Samantha Marryott had not noticed my reaction: she had merely nodded, as recognizing an old acquaintance she had thought about often.

“That's the thing. I got caught by getting what I wanted. I had him dancing with frustration—he needed a bowler hat stuck on his crotch by the end of that year. And at the beginning of my third year I went down the aisle all in white—that was a laugh—and we were the happy bride and groom. And that's when my troubles began.”

“A lot of women marry rakes, thinking they can reform them.”

That struck no chord with her. Perhaps it was too Victorian an idea.

“I don't think I
thought
at all. I don't think I even
liked
him—not then, and certainly not later. I soon found I was a brief pause between fucking students and fucking more students. I can't say I lost much sleep over it. I went out and did likewise. But he was in a different position, wasn't he? Being a professor. Ten years later and he'd have been up on a disciplinary charge about that. In fact ten years later he was lucky to wriggle out of one. He turned his attention elsewhere after that. In fact he'd always kept his eggs in more than one basket.”

“Sounds like the sort of man they wrote dirty songs about in my boyhood days.”

She threw back her head and emitted that mirthless barking laugh again.

“Tell me about it. I don't remember songs but there were
jokes and limericks and slogans in the loos. He preened himself on that, wrote them all down when he was told about them. He always said when he retired he was going to write a late-twentieth-century version of
My Life and Loves.
‘Frank Harris has nothing on me,' he used to say. As it was he was too busy fucking to do much about it. When he died I found notes and parts of one chapter. I chucked them straight in the Aga.”

“You don't seem to feel any jealousy toward the women.”

“Good God, no. How can you feel jealousy toward so many? Contempt if anything, and pity. . . . Toward his whore I suppose I felt a bit differently.”

“He had a regular mistress as well?”

She screwed up her face in distaste.

“I suppose you could describe her as that. But she was a whore for all that—a regular cash-on-the-nail whore, with a little stable of subwhores. Patrick didn't pay, though.”

“I suppose he counted as an honored guest.”

She pouted and shook her head.

“He'd helped to set her up. If you could have shares in a brothel he'd have been the majority shareholder. This had been going on for years before he married me, and it went on for years afterward, too.”

“Was this a former student who decided bodily prostitution paid better than intellectual prostitution?”

We both laughed. We were both academic insiders, or so she thought.

“Search me. I just knew her as Mrs. Labelle. Corny, wasn't it? Ran a genteel and exclusive establishment in Kensington—none of your Soho or King's Cross knocking-shops for
her.
The clientele was practically handpicked: politicians, aristocracy, show biz, high-flying academics. Well, it wasn't
exactly
hand-picked, a lot of the customers heard about it by word of mouth. Connoisseurs of outré experiences tend to recognize their own
kind, and pass the message on when they've discovered a good thing.”

“Ah, so this wasn't just a run-of-the-mill brothel.”

“Not at all. The more out-of-the-way the taste the more welcome you were. Madam entertained in the wider sense: you spent an evening there, rather than twenty minutes. The conversation was good, deals could be done, contracts made, similarity of tastes established—all this while this fantastic witty and erudite fucking
talk
was going on around you. Upstairs anything went and tact and discretion were assured. Oh, from what I heard it was a very clever establishment, filling a real need—Patrick's own words.”

“Sounds like a prototype of the Groucho Club.”

We both giggled.

“You're a fun academic you are,” said Samantha, putting a hand on my arm. “You must really wow the students. Anyway, money had been put into this business, and in the early years of our marriage money came out of it. We didn't always live in a squalid little hole in Peckham, you know. But then the trade figures at Chez Labelle started dipping—”

“Fashions change,” I commented sympathetically.

“That was it, partly, and moral habits, too. Cabinet ministers could get what they fancied in private life, without paying sky-high prices. Good conversation became even more of a lost art, and most people wouldn't know how to make it, or respond to it. Anything went in most spheres of life as far as kinks were concerned. When the going got tough Labelle got reckless. I never heard the details. Patrick might boast to me when things were going well, but he clamped up when things were on the slide. You hear things though, and from what I heard I gathered that Madam was being questioned about blackmail allegations. All the rooms in the establishment were of high-class hotel standard, and she'd bugged the phone in one room and
got something on an Opposition spokesman on something or other. When she tried it on with him he went straight to the police. That busted the reputation the place had in the sexual underground for total discretion. So that was the end of a nice little earner for Patrick—for Patrick and me, if I'm being absolutely honest.”

“Did you ever hear what happened to Mme. Labelle?”

“No. I wasn't likely to. Patrick's first instinct, if anyone associated with him was in trouble, was to pull up the drawbridge. She was out there and he was in his battlemented stronghold. The most he'd do would be to wave good-bye. There were other people banging on the door at the same time, other—to mix the metaphor, as Patrick wouldn't fail to point out if he were here—other pigeons coming home to roost. His career came to a halt. He was already a professor, so there weren't many upward avenues left, but for a time, as I've said, there was a question of a disciplinary inquiry, perhaps of him losing his chair. In the end everyone decided it wouldn't be worth the stink, and things were swept under the carpet, as they usually are in universities. Frankly, students were bought off. Patrick by then had a taste for the good life, but gradually we outspent our resources, and by the end his pension wasn't doing much more than covering our drinking costs. Our lives took a nosedive. It was a squalid death, Patrick's.”

“Sad, sad,” I commented, while feeling it was totally deserved.

“So that's the story of my life,” said Samantha. “I don't suppose you wanted to hear it, but you did. Thanks for listening. How about telling me about yours?”

“Nothing near as Shakespearean to tell,” I said.

“Big things can follow from an affair with one's researcher.” She looked around the near-deserted pub. “Doesn't look like she's going to turn up.”

“Doesn't look like it,” I agreed.

“Why don't you come back with me? Tell me your story. Everybody's got a story, somewhere.”

“Why not?” I said, thinking of any number of reasons. She put an arm around my waist and I put an arm around hers, and that way we supported each other out into the scruffy street. She turned in the direction of Underwood Lane. I hadn't wanted to give her the impression I'd scraped acquaintance with her to wriggle her story out of her. On the other hand there were limits to what I was willing to do to cover my tracks.

“I've got a bottle in the car,” I said.

“I've got bottles at home,” she said, but she seemed interested.

“Best malt whiskey,” I said, disengaging myself at her front gate. “Back in a tick.”

She waved as I disappeared around the corner. I expect she guessed. I sent her a card addressed to the Cock and Pheasant, saying I'd found my car had been wheel-clamped and I'd had to deal with it to get to a later engagement. I signed it Derek Barton and I said I hoped we'd meet again pretty soon. If you tell one lie you might just as well tell two, or so all politicians think. Anyway, I shouldn't think Marvyn passed the card on.

That weekend I rang Matthew Martindale to bring him up-to-date on what I had been doing. On our one meeting I'd had a feeling for him that amounted almost to regarding him as a brother, and I didn't want to lose that feeling. He seemed to have something of the same. It was late Saturday, the children were in bed, and he called Janet over to listen to my news, because he said she was interested.

He responded with the sort of immediate and wholehearted interest that is loved by any storyteller—or any political speech-maker, come to that, though I can't pretend I've ever aroused it. His reaction to my stalker, to the telephone communications, and the information from my father's cousin were just what was needed to hearten me, and when I told him about
Professor Frere's account of Lucy's pregnancy he said: “Now you
know
who you are.” The revelation of the twin brother provoked a sort of three-way conversation, with Janet full of excited speculation. Oddly enough, when I happened to mention that I probably wouldn't be using Frieda Brewer anymore as my researcher, partly because she was contemplating a book on the Revill case, Matthew exploded.

“Bloody woman! What kind of mind do these muckrakers have? Why can't she let the story die a natural death?”

He sounded like an aristocrat of the old school, confronted by a piece of impertinence from one of his estate workers.

“I don't think she's a muckraker,” I said patiently. “In fact she's not a journalist at all, just someone journalists use. She's intrigued by the whole business, and thinks there's a book in it.”

“That's muckraking, whether she's a journalist or not. What business is it of hers?”

“I'm afraid it became a public matter when your father murdered your mother.”

There was a second's silence.

“You think I'm overreacting?”

I was heartened to hear a woman's laugh at the other end.

“A little. I can hear Janet agrees with me. You know the subject gets raked up periodically, Matthew. It's a minor national scandal. Eventually someone was bound to write a book on it, and Frieda's would at least be scholarly and sober. I'm surprised, actually, that something much worse hasn't come out before this.”

“Oh Lord,” said my brother. “It's like something hanging over you—something you know in your heart is eventually going to happen—like your daughter's first love affair, or one of the children experimenting with drugs. The fact that you know it's going to happen doesn't make it any easier when it does.”

We talked for some time, on and around the recent revelations. When Janet heard I was speaking from Milton she made the obvious but sensible suggestion that I should have a systematic going-through of any family papers in the house. Then Matthew told me that he and his sister had talked about me and what I was doing. She had promised to trawl through her memories to see if there was anything there that might be of use to me. We ended with declarations of an intention to meet up again.

That was Saturday night. On Sunday I slept in, visited my father, and then took to the road. At one o'clock I made a detour off the motorway to avoid the revolting and expensive eateries which are the only option for the traveler in a hurry. I found a cozy village pub to have a traditional lunch in and read
The Observer
while I tucked in at leisure. When I got to London I went on spec to call on Susan, found her in, and we went over all sorts of possible leads in the Revill case, then went out for a light Indian meal.

I arrived back in Pimlico about ten. I left the car ticking over in the street while I went and unlocked my garage. Then I drove the car in, came out, and turned to swing the door down and lock it. It was as I was bending down that I felt the knife. It was the oddest of sensations because before it became pain it was almost a sensuous feeling, and I could picture the knife—so sharp, so thin that it almost felt like a needle going into my back below the ribs, and once in being twisted. I clutched the door handle I was locking, cried out for help, then fell forward onto the cold concrete, feeling the wet sensation of blood soaking into my shirt. As I cried out for help I was conscious of steps running away, but of none running toward me.

W
hen I awoke in hospital I was attached to a device involving pulleys which enabled me to lie in something close to a resting position but left my lower back swinging free. When I asked the nurse how I had got there she said what I needed was rest. True enough, but not easy, and when I finally dozed off it was with the help of a narcotic, something I abominate. What I had was sleep rather than rest. I dreamed my old dream of fleeing along dark streets that progressively narrowed and enclosed me.