Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (10 page)

“I had to reprove Paddy just a little in a review in
Literature
once—” Elena Kirkus smiled reminiscently; her gentle smile was really more terrifying than her frown, Jemima decided. Dr. Kirkus looked round her. “Alec Redding, now, with all his faults, there’s a first-rate mind. As for your young friend—”

They were interrupted by Claire herself. “Paddy’s taking my car,” she announced swiftly. “It’s ridiculous for him to get a taxi to go all that way to that remote place at this time of night, even if he could. And of course he must go and see if Marie’s all right. No, don’t be silly, Paddy. How could I possibly need it myself? I’m here with Jemima till dawn, aren’t I, discussing the good old days. Everyone drives my car. Everyone except Alec: he’s too snobbish about cars.”

“Too knowledgeable maybe: not always the same thing.” It was Dr. Kirkus in her tart way who came to Alec Redding’s defence, as though regretting her earlier attack. The Professor himself remained silent.

But Claire rattled on regardless, “Oh, go on, Paddy, take it.”

How elated she was! And Claire’s careless generosity with her possessions reminded Jemima of the vivid girl she had known at Cambridge: there was something voluptuous about such generosity, as though Claire was secretly signalling, “Have me too.” Jemima was to remember that elation further on during the evening when Claire outlined in private a less than happy situation. The words, both sad and sadly familiar, tumbled out.

“She simply doesn’t understand him, she can’t seem to make an effort—that awful wine-throwing was about the most positive thing I remember Marie
doing
in public. She’s silent most of the time. No one knows what she’s thinking—” And so on and so on.

At the same time another picture was emerging, a picture of a large, comfortable country house, way beyond any don’s salary, situated in a picturesque Mallow country village, far from the bustling university town. Here lived a withdrawn and wealthy woman and her good-looking unfaithful husband; and as far as Jemima could make out, there was no real sign of this ménage, happy or unhappy, coming to an end. The ugly—or encouraging—word divorce was not mentioned by Claire at any point, she noted.

At one point Claire even said, “Sometimes I hate him! I wish he were dead. No, I wish
I
were dead. It’s just that I hate him for being so weak: he’ll never leave her, her and her lovely money. Oh, forget it, Jemima. I think I’m rather drunk.” She had indeed polished off most of a bottle of red wine, no Chambertin this, but some rougher vintage designed for late drinking when it headed in the general direction of oblivion. Jemima herself had drunk one glass and stopped.

So it could hardly have been the wine which gave her such disturbed dreams and half-waking reflections; perhaps it was the tension still lingering from her speech on the one hand and an unexpectedly fraught social evening on the other. In particular the lines of the old ballad began to weave through her brain in zany fashion, rearranging themselves in new patterns:

Other lines came back to her: the ominous presage to Sir Patrick Spens’s journey when his servant had seen “the new moon with the auld one in her arms.” A doomed expedition; she began to drift again and the lines drifted with her: “the new woman with the old man in her arms … O who will answer this question of mine?”

When Jemima did wake up to the urgent pleading summons of Claire Donahue, the latter’s ravaged face and desperate cry seemed to come straight out of her threatening dream.

“He’s dead,” she was saying. “Oh Christ, how shall I bear it? What shall I do? He’s dead—”

“Of course he’s dead,” muttered Jemima stupidly; she was still within the ballad’s nightmare. “Sir Patrick Spens is dead.” Luckily Claire did not seem to hear her.

“Paddy,” she was wailing over and over again. “Paddy, oh Paddy.”

Throughout the day which followed, Jemima saw it as her duty to remain in Mallow: it would hardly be honourable to depart hastily for London in the wake of such a ghastly tragedy. Besides, she could support Claire. The details of Paddy Mayall’s death gradually emerged. None was pleasant. First it transpired that he had crashed his car—Claire’s car—through Mallow’s historic medieval bridge and into the Avon below. The car appeared to have gone out of control, or else he had taken the bridge too fast in the darkness. He had then drowned in the fast-flowing, storm-swollen river—perhaps he had hit his head first and been knocked unconscious—but that was not yet known for certain. All that was bad enough. Worse was to follow in the afternoon.

“The police,” Claire said in a dull voice, tears temporarily stilled. “The police have been to see me. Because it was my car: the car he was driving, the car that crashed.
They think it may have been tampered with, fixed in some way. The brake linings were virtually severed and then—he didn’t get very far, did he?” She was beginning to tremble again. “I don’t understand about cars, but I wasn’t careless about
that
kind of thing, it had only just come back from the garage. If someone did it on purpose, who on earth would want to kill
me
?” Claire ended on a piteous note.

Then she gasped. “Oh my God, are they suggesting I killed Paddy?” She began to weep again. “How could they believe that? How could anyone? He should never have been driving. If only Marie hadn’t run off like that, if only Alec hadn’t got going on the subject of his stupid bloody wine, oh, curse him for it—that started the whole thing off—”

“Wait a minute.” The haunting images of the night were beginning to re-form in Jemima’s mind, at first in spite of herself, and then in a more purposeful fashion. “O who will answer this question of mine.?” She let the images have their way. She began to see what an answer to the question might be.

It was Dr. Kirkus to whom she posed it. She found the older woman seated in the college library in front of a large open book; but her attitude indicated mourning rather than reading; her spectacles lay useless beside the book.

“I was very fond of Paddy.” Her manner was composed as ever. “Lightweight maybe in intelligence, but yet—” She stopped. For once Dr. Kirkus appeared to be at a loss how to go on. Jemima took the opportunity to ask her a question.

Other questions and other answers would follow. The police would later fill in all the grisly details of the truth in their patient, relentless and admirable manner. But before that process could get under way, Jemima had to put her own question.

“Why do you ask me?” Dr. Kirkus looked steadily at her.

“You have a first-class mind.” Jemima’s smile was not without irony. She added, “And besides, you know them.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Kirkus after a long silence. “It could have happened like that. It would have been in both their characters. Certainly what seemed outwardly to take place was not in either of them. So the evidence suggests—” She paused to assume her spectacles. “I was very surprised by Alec even at the time, and even more surprised by Marie.” It was a judgment, the first judgment but not the last, on Professor Redding and his mistress, Marie Mayall, for the murder of her husband Paddy.

When you looked at the events of the previous night from another angle, thought Jemima afterwards, how simple they seemed: planned with the same determination as her own speech, but with none of the same reluctance. A clever man, sexually active with a taste for high living, determined to marry his less intelligent colleague’s wealthy wife; the fact that the aforesaid colleague had not the sense to be faithful but actively philandered with a member of the same college was simply an added bonus. With Marie—reserved but passionate—in his thrall, it was easy for Alec Redding to devise his own very public insult: then Marie’s carefully coached response followed, which got her away from the dinner and home to safety in her own car.

The inevitable offer of another car—Claire’s car—came next: inevitable because Claire famously lent out her car, and since she was due to spend the night talking to her old friend she would scarcely need it herself. Redding’s stained shirt was then the perfect excuse for him to leave the hall and fix the brakes … Redding, who was “snobbish” but also “knowledgeable” about cars … As for the brakes, supposing suspicion fell afterwards: where was it likely to fall but on Claire herself? Claire who was jealous of her lover’s refusal to leave his rich wife.

“I wish he were dead,” Claire had told Jemima in a fit of drunken despair. Might not she have told others the same story?

Even if that accident had failed, the blood—the blood red as wine—of Paddy Mayall would have flowed sooner or later. The new woman was to have the old man in her arms. Paddy Mayall’s tragedy had been ordained as surely as that of Sir Patrick Spens, even if it was less noble.

I
can date the beginning of the whole melancholy business quite clearly. It was that bet, I said. That’s what I told the detective, Tomlinson. I saw it all. I was in a privileged position, wasn’t I?

“We both were,” says Bella, adding in that reproving little voice of hers, “We both looked after the Colonel and Lady Sissy.” Then she clicks her tongue, a thoroughly maddening habit.

To return to the beginning: the bet. Let’s face it, Bella was in the kitchen and
I
was getting them their drinks, their PPs, as the Colonel always called them. PP for pre-prandial. He had nicknames for everything, everything to do with drink that is. Posties were post-prandial drinks (not many of those allowed) and MMs, mid-morning drinks, were even rarer: heavy colds or birthdays were about the only things which justified an MM in my experience.

As I told that fellow Tomlinson, the Colonel was never a heavy drinker in all the years I was at the Manor, and believe me I know what I’m talking about. But he was an
opinionated
drinker. I had to explain this several times to Tomlinson before he got the point and then he said something typical like, “He could afford to have opinions, I suppose,” looking around at the Manor in that offensive way of his.

“Manor or no Manor, he was an opinionated man in every way,” I countered, and, hoping to tease, “Opinionated
gentleman
, I should say.” But Tomlinson just sighed, so I ended, “Naturally he had opinions about drinks.”

And that was really how it all began. Drink. The papers called it “
POISON AT THE MANOR HOUSE
” and all that kind of rubbish, but it wasn’t anything to do with the Manor, leastways not how they meant it, it was to do with whisky, whisky versus cocktails. The Colonel’s “medicinal whisky” in his own phrase versus Lady Sissy’s “House Poison” as she used to call her famous cocktail.

“House Poison for me, Henry,” she would say in that high, fluting voice of hers. I can hear it in my ears now; odd how it carried without being half as strong as the Colonel’s voice, carried right through the Manor.

“Henry!” rising on the last syllable. “Henry!” Sometimes in the kitchen Bella would put her hands over her ears.

“She’s not calling
me
,” she would say, as if the tone of voice was somehow my fault.

At this point I would mix Lady Sissy’s special cocktail, at least on the good days I mixed it, because I’m sure I never put in half the vodka she did when she mixed it, vodka and whatever else; whereas I, I laid on the grapefruit juice pretty strong (that’s what made it the
House
Poison—the grapefruit juice—as Lady Sissy explained to me when I first arrived).

“Whenever I say ‘House Poison,’ Henry, that’s what I want.”

“Why don’t you just ask for poison straight up?” the
Colonel grunted. As he did, in almost exactly the same words, on so many other occasions. That was the point: the Colonel and Lady Sissy swore by their own particular tipple—no harm in that since they were rich enough to afford it, as someone like Tomlinson would be sure to point out. The trouble was that they could never leave it at that: always on at each other on the subject. All a struggle for domination, says I, having studied psychology by post a year or two back: Bella didn’t approve, but I pointed out that it would help me deal with the old couple (and save me going mad with the monotony, I might have added, but didn’t, Bella being obviously part of the monotony).