Festering Lilies (2 page)

About eighteen months earlier, soon after he had been given DOAP (his first ministerial job), Algernon Endelsham, to the astonishment of the entire staff, had started to pursue Willow. The incoming minister was the handsomest thing that had been seen in either House of Parliament since Lord Palmerston, he was sensationally young for his position, well-known on television, apparently rich, famously athletic, brilliantly clever (some people thought he was even cleverer than Willow herself, though that was hotly debated in the office canteen at the time) and with a devilish reputation as far as women were concerned.

Despite herself, Willow had been half-flattered as well as half-amused by his advances, but she had had enough doubts about his sincerity and motives to ensure that she kept her own genuine admiration of him in check. Besides, she had secrets to keep and they meant that she was never tempted to succumb to the minister's undoubted charms. Her life was thoroughly satisfactory to her and she would no more have thought of complicating the Civil Service part of it with an affair with her minister than she would have joined an Everest attempt or a space flight to the moon.

The sound of her office door opening made her turn from her sightless contemplation of the trees of the common. She looked round to see Roger placing a cup of deep-orange-coloured tea on her desk with exaggerated care.

‘Thank you, Roger,' she said in a dismissive tone. Ignoring it, he lingered by the door for long enough to say:

‘I am sorry, Miss King. It's terrible enough for us all, but for you…' The dying fall on the last word was masterly and he could not quite resist waiting to see how she took it. Disconcertingly, she laughed.

‘Yes, Roger. Thank you very much. Don't forget to find out from Barbara what the permanent secretary wants me for and get all the files I'm likely to need in here half an hour before I have to see him.' This time Roger accepted his dismissal and left her alone.

Willow took a sip of the tea, winced as the violence of the tannin hit her palate, but then drank thirstily. She had planned to get straight down to work, but found that she could not: the news she had just heard seemed to have driven all thoughts of work out of her mind. Sitting at her desk she tried to translate the physical shock she had felt at the news of Algy's death into appropriate emotion.

The thought of it made Willow feel sick; imagining his pain and terror dried out her mouth and made the palms of her hands sweat; and yet she could not find any tears for him. Throughout her austere childhood, crying had been forbidden, and she had always been encouraged to rationalise away or deeply bury any feelings that were strong enough to threaten her stability. As a result she had grown into a woman whose immense competence was never spoiled by recognisable anguish, passion or even anxiety.

It had been her parents'nightmare that the child they had brought into the world so late in their lives might be unable to look after herself when they died, or be dangerously unhappy without them. To preempt either eventuality, they had straggled all her life to teach her to be self-sufficient emotionally as well as in every practical way. They had succeeded all too well, and when they did die within six months of each other, Willow was well able to live without them. She was also quite unable to grieve properly for them.

The shock of that inability had shown her what their wholly altruistic training had done to her. Willow was far too rational to blame her parents for it, and she had set about trying to learn to allow herself feelings. But not all the rationality and determination in the world could make good the lack of thirty years' natural experience of strong emotion. She was deeply shocked by the death of Algernon Endelsham. The horror of it would, she told herself, remain with her for a long long time. But she could not cry for him.

There was another horror, too, and perhaps a worse one: someone had hated or feared her old suitor enough to batter in his skull until he was dead. The thought of that hatred was stifling.

Without even realising what she was doing, Willow applied the old recipe for self-control and tried to find other ways of thinking about Algy's death in order to rationalise the horror she had felt.

Subconsciously searching her frugal northern mind for some distraction, she started to think about the waste his death represented. There were very few politicians of such talent, let alone such aesthetic appeal, on either side of the House. Algy had had a fine brain, and a quick wit that turned the dullest DOAP meeting into an entertainment for anyone who could keep up with him. Willow had been one of the few and had greatly enjoyed the sparks that their minds had struck off each other. The vivid memory of some of those meetings made her smile in the solitude of her office;

DOAP had been a safe if dreary place before Algy's advent. He had done much to remove the complacency and the safety, but he had lightened the dreariness too.

Willow knew that she would miss his incisive intelligence and his sometimes cruel wit. She heard someone coming in to her outer office and made certain that her face showed no sign of the turmoil in her mind. Whatever her reservations about her tendency to rationalise away emotion, she had absolutely no desire for her staff and colleagues to see evidence of any of her feelings.

At that thought she even laughed a little bitterly. The news that she had seemed at all distressed at the announcement of Algy's death would have fled round DOAP in an instant and would have confirmed her colleagues, seniors and subordinates in the universal view that she had succumbed to Algy as soon as he had so inexplicably tried to seduce her.

Willow knew quite well that as a spinster in her late thirties, with apparently only an aunt to love, unbecomingly dressed in her neutral suits and low-heeled shoes, she was considered to be an object of half-pitying derision by a large section of the office. At the time of Algy's pursuit she had even overheard a conversation between two arrogant young principals from another division saying patronisingly how sensible it was of estabs to have put poor Willow into an innocuous department like DOAP instead of Defence or the FO where she'd have been easy meat for any Russian-lover trap.

The object of their scorn had laughed at the time, and she wished that she could not laugh any more. Algy, who had said that he loved her – although she had never been able to believe him – had been beaten to death. Willow put down her cup and rested her face in her hands. To know that any human being had suffered like that was horrible, but a man she had known and liked.… What could he have thought in that split second before unconsciousness, when he must have known that he would die? Her mind flinched at the thought.

In order to distract herself from it, she tried to imagine what sort of person could have killed him like that. Willow was slightly appalled to discover that her mind was thoroughly intrigued by the identity and motivation of the killer and not at all interested in wreaking vengeance on him – or her.

The red telephone at her right elbow shrilled with illusory urgency. Willow started at the noise, sat up straighter, and picked up the receiver.

‘Willow King,' she said in a voice that betrayed no agitation or sorrow at all.

‘Willow, Bob Smith here,' came the voice of the permanent secretary's private secretary. ‘The PUS can't make eleven-thirty, but since the finance committee meeting has been cancelled, would you come at three?'

‘Cancelled,' repeated Willow blankly. ‘Why?'

‘Well, with the minister hardly cold and no replacement appointed, we can hardly …'

‘Oh, no, of course not. Right, Bob. Three o'clock. I'll check with Barbara.'

‘I already have. That's OK. I can tell the PUS then?'

‘Yes, all right.'

Willow replaced the scarlet receiver and made herself look at the letter file in front of her. Speculating on the reasons for the death of her erstwhile friend and suitor would do no good at all, she told herself. But she found that the letters could have been written in Mongolian for all they meant to her as her mind began to rove over the probable or even possible enemies of Algy Endelsham.

Knowing that she really would have to achieve some self-control if she were to get any work done, she took a deep breath and started to read the letters in the file on her desk. Some she annotated, others she put aside to think about; and on the rest she scribbled notes for Barbara and the rest of her staff. At the bottom of the file, though, was a sad letter from one of the minister's constituents, a widow of eighty-two who could not understand the new pensions legislation and felt that she had been roughly treated at her local DOAP office. A familiar type of letter to politicians no doubt, it was not however the kind of thing that normally appeared on Willow's desk. Her business was with the financial implications of policy, not the nuts and bolts of the application of that policy. Wondering why the letter had reached her desk at all, she turned it over.

There, stuck to the back instead of the front, was an extravagantly large yellow Post-it with a scribbled note in Algy's elegant, if eccentric, handwriting:

Willow, I know this isn't your pidgin, but I'm a bit stuck. We've written endlessly, explained endlessly, and the local office has done everything they can. All we need now, I think, is the sort of letter you are so good at. Could you run one off? I know you're far too busy to be bothered, but no one can do that sort of thing better. Please, Willow?

He had signed it with a hieroglyph that she hoped none of her staff could interpret. It referred to the days of his courtship, when he had bombarded her with flowers and invitations and letters all signed ‘Your devoted and despairing Algy'. At the time of his embarrassing pursuit she had taken his protestations with a giant's pinch of salt, but that morning, perhaps because he was dead, she began to wonder whether she had done him an injustice. Staring down at his handwriting, Willow found herself almost looking at him, so vivid was the picture in her mind. And in a moment that picture was subsumed in an equally vivid one of his handsome face, kicked and bloodied in the mud of Clapham Common.

Willow managed to regain her usual self-discipline in time to get through almost as much work as usual, and by the end of the day she was exceedingly thankful for it. The conversations that were broken off wherever she went in the building, the sly or pitying glances that were cast her way, not to speak of the more overt expressions of curiosity or sympathy, Were enough to overset anyone with a less than rigid self-command. Never had she felt more distant from her colleagues – or more thankful for her separateness.

Curiously enough on that strange and difficult day it was the permanent secretary who came closest to breaking down Willow's control. They were old enemies: he had always resented her quickness and her immediate and easy understanding of statistics and finance, while she despised his slower brain and was deeply frustrated by the petty revenge he exacted from her whenever he could. As she walked down the grey corridors to his room just before three o'clock in the afternoon, inhaling the familiar smells of floor polish, disinfectant and a faint human staleness, she wondered what he would say about the minister. For if the PUS disliked Willow, he had positively hated Algy Endelsham.

Ministers, in the PUS's experience, were easy to manipulate, at least in the early days of their ministerial careers when their confidence was usually shaky. But Endelsham could have run rings round the PUS from his first minute in the department and had rarely tried to hide his own contempt for the man. Willow remembered one funny, if rather unkind, meeting of the finance committee when the PUS had made a complete clot of himself and afterwards Algy had asked her quietly how such a fool could ever have reached the middle echelons of the Home Civil Service, let alone achieved one of the highest appointments. Willow had shrugged and said, ‘He's only such a fool about figures; really very sound on pensions policy … and faithful and long serving. Buggins' turn, I suppose, and the fact that he's never annoyed anyone senior to him by being too clever.'

‘Not like us, you mean, Willsy,' Endelsham had said with an appealing gleam in his grey eyes.

That, she told herself as she arrived outside the PUS's office, must have been what attracted us to each other: neither of us had to struggle to understand the other and we always picked up all the implications of whatever was said, unlike the rest of this lot. Bracing herself for the encounter to come, she pushed open the door.

Bob Smith looked up from his desk, ostentatiously checked his watch, and, having got its approval, smiled at Willow and stood up to announce her to his master. Resisting the temptation to ask him whether he was aping the PUS's absurd mannerisms with a view to achieving seniority, Willow walked past him and stood in front of the PUS's huge mahogany desk.

‘It's a bad business, this,' he said by way of greeting.

‘You could well say so, PUS,' she replied with a derisive twist of her lips.

‘Oh, very sad as well, of course. But we had after all begun to get poor Endelsham into harness and the Lord knows who we'll be landed with next.'

Suddenly it seemed to Willow absolutely monstrous that this time-serving second-rater should talk of Algy Endelsham's death in such terms. She felt her pale face flushing and almost had to bite her tongue to stop herself telling him what she thought of him. He looked up at her as she stood in front of him and said as though he had only just thought of it:

‘Oh, my dear Willow, I am so sorry. I had quite forgotten that this might be a personal bereavement for you. Are you all right? I'd suggest that you took a day or two off were it not for the difficulty of running the new pensions White Paper with only a part-time assistant secretary. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.'

Willow only just managed not to roll her eyes up to heaven. Like all the other inhabitants of DOAP, the permanent secretary made it clear that he believed that Willow King had given in to Algy's seductive charms and must therefore be heartbroken by his death. It was too predictable that the PUS should choose a day on which she might be expected to be vulnerable to needle her about her working arrangements. She listened to what he had to say and compounded her original lie, at last giving vent to a little of the spleen that was churning around inside her.