A Murder in Mayfair (24 page)

She grinned, but nervously.

“I expect you think I'm paranoid, but we've had to be very, very careful over the years—in fairness to him, apart from anything else. We never go over . . .
there
with the sole purpose of seeing him. We've never had anything more than one- or two-night stays with him all these years, and you shouldn't have any longer.”

“I wouldn't want any longer, but I would very much like to meet and talk with him.”

Her voice went still lower.

“We wondered when you could get off.”

I thought.

“The injury helps. The permanent secretary is urging me to take a few days off to recuperate. The end of next week and the weekend would be fine.”

“I'll check. We thought you might go with Matthew and the whole family. You could go with them in the car to Fishguard: the ferry over to Rosslare is best. Matthew's family all go regularly, and the children love it there. A day off school isn't a problem. I'll ring Matthew this afternoon.”

It seemed in the spirit of our communications with each other that I make no comment on the destination, though my brain was ticking overtime with interest. I just nodded.

“It sounds a wonderful idea. I came away from Chatstock wanting to know them better.”

“They liked you, too. Now, there are ground rules. You never mention his name. The children know nothing—they know him, but they don't know who he is. In general it's best only talked about indirectly. You're there to recuperate, and you're going fishing, or walking or shooting. Once you're there with
him you both make your own rules, feel your own way. But I must make this clear: he will
never
talk about the murder.”

“I see.”

“He is old—seventy-odd. He lives with it, but he lives with it
alone.
I must have your promise on that.”

“You have it.”

“Matthew can give you better directions than I can. You'll find Matthew's already told him about you. The village will have heard that a relative is coming, but the less splash you make in the neighborhood the better. Oh, and
never
talk about it on the phone—not even, if it can be helped, in the coded way we have, and that's too complex for you to learn in a hurry. It's evolved over years and years of concealment. Is that understood?”

“Absolutely.”

“'Bye, Colin.”

And with one of her quick, geometric waves she was off. I walked around the park sunk deep in thought for the half hour before I was due to be picked up. My thoughts were predictable. I now knew what I had only suspected for a few days: that I had a father alive. Naturally as I walked I wondered what he would be like. Perfectly futile thought, but perfectly understandable. My other thought was trite, too. I wondered whether I had murder in me—whether we all had the capacity to kill, given the right, or horribly wrong, circumstances. When I got back to the Ministry I ordered a great plateful of sandwiches and ate ravenously.

That night the phone rang in the flat. I had no fear it would be my phantom caller again. That phase, I believed, was over, and the plan now was to leave me with the uneasy feeling that a new and more deadly period had been entered. In the event it was Matthew.

“Colin! Good to hear your voice. I'm told you're well, but not entirely well. Is that right?”

“Pretty much so. I function, but I get tired.”

“What you need is a few days away. Easily said—is it easily done?”

“I don't see why not. I am a minister-—what I say should go, though I'm not sure it always does.”

“What about the weekend after this one?”

“Sounds fine.”

“I wonder, would a short family break tire you too much? The kids have pretty nigh inexhaustible energy as you know, but we could all do with a weekend away.”

“It would please me no end-—old bachelor that I am. And there are plenty of ways of getting away from you all if you become too much.”

“You know the children. I think I can promise they will become too much. You can get away on a Thursday, can't you?”

“Yes, anytime after midday.”

“Be down here by three o'clock then, and leave all the arrangements to me. Just come, and we'll set off.”

So that's what I did. I went up to Milton to do constituency work that weekend, but canceled for the following one. Everyone was very understanding, because the fact that I'd been “mugged” had been widely publicized in the local papers. People seemed to take it as proof that I was not a cosseted minister, but went about my business pretty much like a normal person, as an old lady put it to me. I went to see my father, who just recognized me. I was cautioned against seeing his weakness as a sign that his ordeal was approaching its end. I called in on George Eakin and brought him selectively up to date. His gratitude and interest made me feel a louse about holding out on him over several vital details, but the secrets were not mine to
confide. I suppose those feelings of guilt were akin to feelings Matthew and Caroline must have had very often over the years.

My reunion with the Martindales was joyful, and the drive in a crowded station wagon to Fishguard was very jolly, full of singing, traveling games, and dreadful children's jokes. That night, very late, in a large and comfortable cottage not far from Wexford, Matthew got down a road map of Ireland, pointed out a village near the coast of County Kerry, and gave me directions thereafter. He went over them twice, and had me repeat them. He said that a Land Rover had been hired, and he'd drive me to pick it up next day in Wexford. We left after an early breakfast, and before the middle of the morning I was driving through the lush southern counties of Ireland, toward the Atlantic coast.

I found the village of Kilrose without any difficulty, and stopped off to pick up provisions, something Matthew had suggested. As soon as I left it the road became quite rough. It was still tarmac, but it was narrow, with dirt sides onto which I had to drive when a rare car or lorry came in the other direction. One had to be vigilant for the occasional pothole. The lack of people was eerie. It was as if the Famine had struck only last year. The strangeness of the landscape was only added to by the occasional house: one story, new, smart, and clean as a this-year's model car in the showroom, and almost as unused. Country retreats, I guessed, for politicians, businessmen, or Common Market functionaries. They served to underline rather than lessen the emptiness of the area. The sheep, grazing on the sparse grass in among rocks and heather, raised their heads as I passed, gazed at me blearily, then got back to business.

Matthew's directions were simple and clear. I turned off at the top of a gentle incline five miles out of Kilrose. The moment I did so I was grateful for the toughness of the Land Rover I had hired. Matthew had known that anything less
could have met with problems. The path was rocky, pitted, and what I could have done if I'd met with another car, beyond reverse and back right down the road, I couldn't imagine. But Matthew had told me that there would be no other car, and there wasn't.

When I'd driven a little over a mile the path veered to the left and I saw in the distance a cottage—little more than a hut. It was of stone, with a door set in the middle and small windows on either side. A plume of smoke was rising from the chimney. The path got no better as I approached, but I was able to pull up right outside the cottage door—it faced the path because here it ended. There was no other car there. I turned off the ignition and got out. Heather, with greener patches, stretched out to infinity, with not another cottage in sight. The place seemed deserted, but as I turned toward the little stone structure, intending to bang on the door, I was hailed from some way away. My heart stopped as I turned. On a little knoll a couple of hundred yards away there stood a man—an old man, thin but erect, his voice strong. I made toward him through the dead heather and rocks, stumbling from time to time. He, coming in the other direction, had all the confidence of decades of familiarity. As he got closer I saw that the thinness was not fragility but a spare toughness of frame. He showed his years most in his lined face, but the lines gave it an immense and imposing individuality. His hands were gnarled, but his walk and his carriage belied his years. He came up to me and I could think of nothing else to do but stretch out my right hand. He had other ideas, and he embraced me and I, awkwardness gone, hugged the old man close.

“We're more open here,” he said, “more emotional. Not a bad thing.” The voice had a slight, soft Irish burr. He broke away and held me at arm's length to look at me. “How like Matthew you are!” he said wonderingly.

“I know,” I said, my voice breaking as I spoke to him for the first time. “When I look at him it's like a slightly wrong mirror image. And we're both like your father.”

He pondered that. Everything he did was slow.

“I think of my father as much older—and he always was remote to me. It's Matthew you call to mind.”

“And there must be something of you because it was that that brought your name into the whole matter—my shape, the way I sit or hold myself: there must be something.”

“I probably wouldn't know, would I? I don't see myself. Well, well, this is a wonderful pleasure. I'm sorry I wasn't here to greet you. A sheep has been off-color. Come in, come in.”

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.