Hindsight (6 page)

As Paul was coming back up between the trees he saw that there were figures walking along the path from the boat-house, two women, Mad Molly and her friend. He realised that they must have been what disturbed the deer in the first place, and by concentrating their attention on the danger behind caused them not to notice Paul's almost-ambush. There wasn't anyone else around. He didn't want to meet Mad Molly, not because he was really afraid of her, but because she was obviously a dotty old woman, likely to do or say something embarrassing. So he waited behind a large tree close by the path, preparing to edge round it as the women shuffled past.

He was standing there, listening for the faint pad of footsteps but partly distracted by studying the pattern of deep, slanting grooves in the chestnut-bark, when a voice close behind his neck said, ‘Boo!'

He leapt. There may not have been much outward movement, but his heart seemed to bound as the deer had, and he felt the same surge of panic-triggered energies. He managed to turn, cheeks hot, palms sweating. Mad Molly was smiling at him round the tree trunk. She had clear pale blue eyes which sparkled with the fun of it.

‘How did you know I was there?' he said.

‘Witchcraft, of course.'

‘I'm allowed beyond Painted Trees. I've got praes', er, privileges.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that. I'd much rather you'd been breaking a rule—so much more interesting. What's your name?'

‘Rogers, ma'am.'

‘Nonsense. You're no more Rogers than I am ma'am. My name is Mary, but most of my friends call me Molly. Your name is …?'

‘Paul.'

‘That's more like it. Come and meet my friend Daisy. She's a bit sad today.'

Trapped, Paul followed her out on to the path. The other woman was absorbedly moving a chestnut husk to and fro with her stick, but she looked up and stared at Paul.

There was something awful about her. It wasn't just that she was rather ugly, with a flat, pale crinkled face with hairs sticking out of it, and a podgy body dressed in a lot of different-coloured fringed shawls. Paul became used to her after that first meeting and ceased to notice the effect, but there in the chestnut grove he was immediately certain that he didn't want to get any nearer.

‘His name's Paul,' said Mad Molly.

‘How old?' said the Daisy-woman.

‘Twelve, ma'am,' said Paul.

‘Twelve, ma'am,' said Mad Molly. It might have been Paul's own voice.

‘I'll do that every time you use that stupid word,' she went on. ‘I'll come to church on Sunday, see if I don't, and do it in front of your friends.'

‘Six years still,' said the Daisy-woman.

‘Before you can fight in this stupid war, she means,' said Mad Molly. ‘Daisy's obsessed by the war. Don't worry, darling. I expect Paul's father is fighting away like a hero, winning a medal a week.'

‘My father's dead,' said Paul.

‘Dead in
my
war?' said the Daisy-woman.

‘Don't be an idiot, darling,' said Molly.

‘But he did fight in the Great War,' said Paul. ‘He got the MC.'

‘Ah!' said the Daisy-woman.

She took a pace forward and raised her arms as if she was going to hug Paul. He only just managed not to edge away. If he hadn't already decided she was mad—madder if anything than Mad Molly—he would have thought she was drunk. Mrs Fison, who was married to Uncle Charles's gamekeeper, sometimes got drunk and when she did had that kind of look, dazed, miserable, not quite sure whether she was dreaming or waking. Paul was concentrating on the Daisy-woman, apprehensive about the hug and puzzled by her behaving like Mrs Fison, so he didn't notice when Mad Molly changed.

‘Look at me, Paul,' she said.

Her voice still had the bubble of amusement in it, but the note of mockery was gone, and a sort of excitement or happiness had come in. When he turned to face her she was bending forward, staring at him in a way that compelled him to stare back, to study her without shyness, just as she was studying him. She was not, he saw, terribly old—nothing­ like as old as the Grannies, for instance, no, only a few years older than Mummy. The reason he'd thought she was old was the way she usually held herself, very straight and proud, like a granny. But her hair wasn't white, just pale blonde with a bit of grey. She wore a lot of powdery make-up but it wasn't there to hide wrinkles. Her face was a bit like a cat's with its small pointy chin and neat mouth, and then the wide, high cheek-bones and those round blue eyes …

‘Your father was a lieutenant and then a captain in the Warwickshires,' she said. ‘He got his MC when he was wounded at Bixschoote. His name was Cyril but everybody called him Rogue. He could juggle five wine glasses at a time.'

‘I … I didn't know about the glasses,' said Paul.

‘Can't you see the likeness, darling?' said Mad Molly. ‘This is Rogue Rogers's son! Don't you remember that night at the
Vache Ivré
when he tried to dance the can-can with his leg still in plaster and we had to smuggle him back into hospital at four in the morning?'

The wind sighed among the chestnut leaves. The Daisy-woman shook her head slowly from side to side. Tears began to stream from her eyes.

‘Don't bother about her, Paul,' said Mad Molly. ‘Tell me, have you any brothers and sisters?'

‘There's a new baby, but she's only a step.'

‘So sensible of your mother to marry again,' said Mad Molly, the mocking note back now. ‘How did poor Rogue come to die so young? He was as strong as a horse when we were looking after him.'

‘It was in an aeroplane,' said Paul. ‘When I was five. My godfather was going to start an airline in South America and Daddy went out to help him. They had a new aeroplane and it was bigger than the one my godfather was used to. He let the wing touch the ground just after they'd taken off. Daddy was in the plane with him. They were trying it out.'

‘What rotten luck!'

‘Much better than dying in bed,' said the Daisy-woman.

‘You're going to come to tea with me on Sunday,' said Mad Molly.

‘I'm afraid we're only supposed …'

‘Piffle. Annette will arrange it with Mr Smith. She can bring you down.'

‘But …'

‘Goodbye, Paul. Remember, if you don't come I shall turn up in church the Sunday after and kiss you in front of the whole school.'

Mad Molly spun away and strode off down the path. The Daisy-woman, still weeping, stumped after her. Paul stood among the soaring rough-barked tree trunks with his mouth opening and closing, as if it were still trying to say words that hadn't come. In any case he had no idea what they would, or could, have been.

6

D
obbs's response was the last I could have expected.

Admittedly I was apprehensive about the material I had sent him, because it had so little to do with his own interests. For different reasons I wasn't all that happy with it myself, though I had evolved what seemed to me the beginnings of a promising plot. I won't go into the details, but it was to do with spying on the naval base at Exmouth, via the officers who came to Molly's Sunday teas; its only significance to this book is that I could have persuaded myself that such an implausible farrago made sense; I would, I now see, have been satisfied with almost anything that allowed me to write about Paul, and Molly, and the Captain, and the deer. But at the same time I was aware that these elements, in particular the deer, were beginning to put the book out of balance.

Yet the deer were vital. I knew that at an irrational level. They were the key. For example, if Dobbs at our first meeting had had time to ask me how I'd come to meet Molly, I would have said something like, ‘Oh, I was out for a walk in the park and I ran across her and we got talking and it turned out she'd known my father.' But the details of the incident, which apart from a few turns of phrase I believe I have now recalled exactly, were wholly lost to me until in describing Paul's almost-ambush of the deer by the lake I once again saw in my mind's eye the way that particular hind leaped with shock at the sight of me. Instantly I also remembered—re-lived would be a better word—the parallel leap of shock inside my own torso when Molly crept up behind me. I found this process of rediscovery immensely absorbing. I wanted to go on with it, even though I knew that in practical terms it wasn't either what I should be doing to earn my living or what Dobbs had asked for. I quite expected some form of reproof from him. But certainly not a telephone call at 3 a.m.

I loathe being telephoned in the small hours. It always gives me a headache next day. One wakes with such a pulse of alarm, one feels the need to rush and crash through the dark to stop the wretched thing clanging away, waking the whole house. One's sure it's a wrong number but at the same time aware that something semi-appalling may be about to be sprung on one—one of the children being picked up for drunk driving, for instance, or worse. One's sleep-metabolism is disrupted by the rush of daytime biochemicals, especially if it's a wrong number after all, and there's nothing one can do to absorb the loosened energies.

I picked up the phone and enunciated my own number.

‘Rogers?' said a voice, a stranger still, at the far end.

‘Yes.'

‘Dobbs here.'

‘Oh … Can it wait till morning?'

‘I'd rather not, if you don't mind. I take it I've got you out of bed.'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm sorry about that. I picked up your stuff because I thought it might help me sleep.'

‘We have our uses.'

Dobbs didn't respond either to my meaning or tone. He sounded, if anything, angrier than I was.

‘This figure you refer to as the Captain,' he said. ‘I take it that he is not a complete invention?'

‘The Captain?'

I was bewildered. I suppose I must have known what Dobbs was talking about, but the passages had been clearly marked (or rather left unmarked) by me as not really concerning him and therefore to be read as fiction.

‘Captain Smith,' he said. ‘One of the new masters in your latest instalment.'

‘Oh. Both pretty well factual so far, I think. But …'

‘What? Oh, I see. No, I'm not concerned with the other chap. But the Captain in fact both looked and spoke as you have described?'

‘Best I could do.'

‘I take it that his name was in fact Smith?'

‘Yes.'

‘May I ask you to think carefully about my next question? You have him say something about speaking nine languages, and you follow that up with a phrase …'

‘“I am wanted by the police of five countries.”'

‘That's it.'

‘Well?'

‘Did he in fact use those words?'

‘Often.'

‘Oh, God!'

I had stopped being angry. The semi-appalling seemed to have happened, but not, this time, to me. I waited.

‘You tell me you don't know much about Steen,' said Dobbs at last.

‘Not really.'

‘You are aware that he was bisexual?'

‘I'd gathered that much.'

‘I have a theory on which I have put considerable weight in my book. It is well known that Steen had far more affairs with women than with men, but was at the same time more casual about his heterosexual relationships. My belief is that he had adapted for his own purposes the ethos of the warrior tribes among whom he spent his early manhood. Those years were crucial to him in a number of ways. Among these was the fact that the tribesmen were polygamists who regarded their wives as property whose primary function was to breed more warriors. The man's most important social relationship tended to be with an apprentice warrior, and this expressed itself in a kind of ritualised homosexuality. You follow me?'

‘Not a very fashionable attitude these days.'

‘No. Following this line I argue that the really important people in Steen's life were about five young men.'

‘What about Molly Benison?'

‘I wish I knew. That's why I'm going through these bloody trunks. But let me finish. I have a reasonable amount of material on the first four of these men, but almost nothing on the fifth. Steen was sharing an apartment with him in Paris in 1921, but did not go about with him as he had with the others. His existence, or presence at a gathering, is occasionally reported. All I have is a phrase in a letter of Rose Macaulay's that he had the head of a Roman emperor on the body of a ballet dancer, and a remark by Reginald Turner that he was a sinister figure who used to talk about being wanted by the police of three countries. His name was Richard Smith.'

‘Good lord!'

‘You see why I felt the necessity to ring you at this unpleasant hour?'

‘Yes. Hold on a tick while I get my dressing-gown.'

Dobbs had evidently been waiting impatiently enough to be speaking before I got the receiver to my ear.

‘… what this means?'

‘Smith knew Molly Benison?'

‘What? Oh, I expect he did. They were in Paris …'

‘I don't think they gave much sign of it when they met.'

‘You saw them together?'

‘Two or three times, I suppose. At Molly's Sunday teas. She once asked me …'

‘I'd prefer to put her on one side for the moment, if you'll forgive me. The question is, is it the same man?'

‘Looks like it. Tell me, did Steen prefer his young men to be beautiful?'

‘Within reason.'

‘I'd be prepared to concede that Captain Smith was striking, but … Oh, I don't know. Twenty years younger and without that incredible moustache …'

‘You agree it is probably the same man?'

‘As a working hypothesis.'

‘All right. Let's go on from there. I need to know everything I can about Smith, not simply to tidy things up. I believe him to have been much more than the last major figure in Steen's emotional life, in fact to have had a crucial influence on him which may explain Steen's dramatic shift of viewpoint to pessimism about the human condition in his last two books. These are in my opinion Steen's crowning achievement, really important contributions to our understanding of ourselves and of the world. Their bleakness of outlook after a lifetime of preaching a gospel of hope has never been adequately accounted for. The change coincides with the end of his affair with Smith.'

‘Yes, I see.'

‘I suppose there's a possibility the man's still alive. He would have to be a little over eighty. Do you know how long he stayed at St Aidan's?'

‘I think he left the same term I did—end of summer '41.'

‘Not very hopeful, I'll try the teachers' agencies. It might be worth putting an ad in
The Times.
You don't remember anyone saying anything about how old Smith got hold of him. Smith … oh, bugger it …'

‘Shall we call Mr Smith The Man and Captain Smith the Captain?'

‘That'll do for the moment. I want to draw your attention to the coincidence here. I don't say it's impossible that two people involved in Steen's life in Paris in 1921 should turn up by chance in the same backwater in Devon, but it seems to me more likely that the later arrival came there on purpose.'

‘I don't …'

‘From what I know of The Man's habits he would have been perfectly happy to avoid agency fees by taking on a chance-come teacher who offered his services.'

‘Well … you know, the Captain didn't give the slightest impression that he wanted to be there. He made out he despised the rest of the staff, didn't much like the boys and loathed the countryside. But he could be a bloody good teacher if he was interested in something. He could really put it over. I got my Eton Schol on a Greek epigram I translated right when all the others made a mess of it, because the Captain was nuts on the
Anthology.'

‘Snippets of homoerotics?'

‘No sign of that, in practice. I was alone with him quite a bit.'

‘Tastes too complex to be satisfied by fresh-faced boys, do you think? The trouble is I don't know enough about him to begin to make a guess.'

‘I doubt if I'm going to be much help to you. He hid himself, if you see what I mean. You never knew what he thought or felt, or even if he meant what he said.'

‘So I'd gathered from your book.'

‘Your idea is that he deliberately chose to come to Paddery to make contact with Molly Benison?'

‘It seems to me possible.'

‘Why on earth? Blackmail? She hadn't got a penny, and in any case she wouldn't have cared a hoot what anyone said about her.'

‘Steen had a peculiar attitude to money. He made quite a bit and insisted on sensible business arrangements with his publishers, but as soon as he received any payments he spent the money or gave it away. He refused to invest or to save, on principle. I told you about his attitude to women and their purpose in the world. He left a number of bastards—I've traced five, for sure. He took very little interest in them, and could be extremely brutal with discarded mistresses. There was more than one suicide. But I can't find a case when he was less than at least tolerant of a woman who had borne him a child, and he always saw to it that they did have money. This was a consistent pattern for most of his adult life. Then, in 1922, he made a will—a highly uncharacteristic thing for him to do in any case. Under its terms the income from most of his books was to be divided between three named beneficiaries—mothers, though the will doesn't say so, of three of the five children I know about. The other two women had married reasonably well-to-do men. But the income from
To Live like the Jackal …
'

‘I imagine that's where the real money was.'

‘Sixty or seventy per cent over the years, I should think. He made a very odd arrangement indeed about that and
The Fanatics,
which until recently can hardly have earned twenty pounds a year. He set up a trust to receive the money and then disburse it according to instructions which were not to be disclosed. I've always thought this odd.'

‘Rather Victorian.'

‘More than that, completely out of keeping. Canny and secretive. Steen detested lawyers, and disliked secrets. For instance, he made no bones about naming the other three women …'

‘Other?'

‘So it turns out. I've just found who was getting the money from that trust. It happens that the agents who manage Steen's estate are the same as mine, and they let me take a look at the accounts. It was the simplest way for me to gauge the continuing popularity of the various books. I did this some months ago, but I kept my notes. Last week I started on the second trunk of Molly Benison's papers and found a bundle of bank statements from the early Thirties. The larger payments are actually detailed in the statements as coming from the trust Steen had set up, and coincide with the amounts accruing from the two books. You follow?'

‘Yes. Yes, of course. But, for God's sake, she never had a penny! She kept telling us so! She kept saying that was why she had to live in a borrowed greenhouse!'

‘You've lost me.'

‘It was a rather grand conservatory, actually, with a gardener's cottage attached. She'd asked Lord Orne—you know, the chap who actually owned Paddery—if she could live there, and …'

‘She asked him if she might go there for a short rest in the spring of 1939. I've found a letter from him dated March 1942, reminding her of the fact and asking if she was yet sufficiently rested. She wasn't paying any rent, you know.'

‘But that was the idea of Annette having a job.'

‘Lost me again.'

‘Annette Penoyre. She lived with Molly. Molly got her the job teaching Freshers so that she could help pay the rent.'

‘Typical.'

‘Of whom?'

‘Smith. Benison. Everybody, I dare say. Shall we call it a night? I'm keeping you up.'

‘I shan't sleep now. It's up to you. I don't want Steen barging into my book, but it looks to me as though Molly must have meant more to him than the other women you describe, and that's why he left her the money. Is there any chance she had a child by him?'

‘No. She lived so publicly. I've been into that. As far as I can make out there wasn't a moment in the period when she wasn't in some gossip column or other once a week. On the other hand Steen certainly pursued her with some vehemence for a couple of years. They spent a lot of one summer sailing off southern Italy. It was a fair-sized boat and they kept it pretty full of friends who came and went. That's when Dufy did that picture of her lying naked on the fishing nets. I've a snapshot of her sitting on a deck with no clothes on which I think must date from that trip. I suppose she and Steen must sometimes have been left on their own, and letters and diaries from visitors seem to assume they were sleeping together pretty routinely. On the other hand there's a letter from Lawrence to David Garnett, bitchy even by his standards, which says Benison was deliberately keeping Steen in a permanent state of rut without letting him get anywhere. She did this with other men, both before and after. There are quite a few accounts of men trying to burst into her room at house-parties, or of her bursting out in the small hours because she'd let them in and then they wouldn't play the game by her rules.'