Poison Flowers (25 page)

As she walked down the Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square and the bus stop she wanted, she thought that the last person she would contact of her own free will would be Michael Rodenhurst. He saw too much and was too free with his questions to be a safe source of information or even friendship. That was a pity, because she had both liked him and found him interesting, but it could not be helped. Willow was not going to admit anyone else into the secrets of her double life if she could help it.

She reached her office in a mood of determined efficiency that made her voice sharply crisp and jolted her staff out of their post-lunch languor. Without letting any of them make excuses for dilatoriness or sloppy work, she spoke to most of them, looked at what they had been doing for the previous two weeks, reprimanded those who needed it, complimented one or two and retreated to her own laden desk to process all the papers that had accumulated there.

By the time she remembered her hair appointment at Gino's salon and the dinner party she was supposed to be attending afterwards, it was twenty-past six. Hurrying to lock away her classified papers and write a list of things for Barbara to deal with over the next two working days, Willow then ran out of the building and back to her flat.

When she got there, she remembered with a lurch of dismay that she had done nothing about finding people to mend the roof and cursed herself, wondering whether some of Cressida's frivolity and reliance on Mrs Rusham were infecting her in her Clapham life. There was no time to do anything that evening and so she changed into her jeans and sweater and set off for Sloane Square.

That evening she did not gain her usual relaxation from the self-indulgence of the hairdressing and manicure. As she sat down at the basin to have her hair washed, she began to wish that she had gone home to Chesham Place first and cross-examined Mrs Rusham about who had been to the flat while she had been away. It was not so much burglars that worried her, because the alarm and all the locks ought to keep them out, as spurious officials from the council or meter-readers or anyone else that Mrs Rusham might have allowed through the front door.

Gino, the lively gossiping owner of the establishment who always dealt with ‘Miss Woodruffe's' hair, was silent as though he understood that she was preoccupied. While one of his apprentices was dusting the prickly ends of hair from her neck after the cutting, Gino laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘Please don't let it get to you so much,' he whispered into her ear. ‘Whatever it is will cure itself and worrying about it gives you ugly lines all over your face.'

At that Willow's frown broke up into a laugh and the lines fell into place.

‘Thanks, Gino,' she said. ‘I needed a little common sense to sort me out. I must go. I'm late.' She left a larger than usual tip for the apprentice, paid her bill and left in order to change into something suitable for Caroline Titchmell's dinner.

Remembering that it had been described as ‘informal', she eschewed the dresses she wore when she and Richard dined together and chose a pair of comfortable black trousers made by Issey Miyake and a loose shirt of fine black-and-white-striped double poplin. Large baroque pearls set in gold in her earlobes and a heavy gold chain round her neck added the necessary touch of ostentation for a successful romantic novelist, and quickly but carefully applied makeup banished all signs of the Civil Servant.

She had ordered a taxi as soon as she reached Chesham Place and before she could so much as read her letters or listen to the messages on her telephone answering machine, the driver rang the doorbell. Grabbing a black suede jacket and shoving money and keys into the pocket, Willow let herself out of the flat, set the alarm and double-locked the door behind her as she had done ever since her burglary and ran down the stairs.

The taxi found his way easily to the house in Notting Hill and she was relieved to see that she was only twenty minutes late. She rang the front-door bell with an apology ready, but Ben Jonson gave her no chance to say anything.

‘Cressida!' he exclaimed, as though her appearance were a wonderful surprise. She thought that he was looking a lot happier than he had done when they met at Richard's. ‘How good that you've got here. I'm afraid that Richard is going to be late.' Willow laughed.

‘These bankers!' she said, but then added more seriously, ‘Surely you were expecting me?'

‘Yes, we were,' he said, ushering her into a brightly lit hall, ‘but I can never manage to get over the feeling that guests won't turn up after all: that they will have forgotten, decided that they didn't want to come, or even that I never asked them.'

‘But in this case you couldn't have worried about the last, because it was Caroline who did the inviting,' Willow said over her shoulder, laughing kindly at him. She rather liked the honesty of his admission of insecurity, but could not quite understand the face he made at her then.

‘Caroline, hello,' she added, seeing her hostess in the open doorway of what turned out to be the drawing room. ‘How nice to see you.'

‘And you,' said Caroline, who was wearing a short dress of deep violet linen that set off her dark hair and made her eyes look brilliant in her pale face. ‘Come and meet Mark and Sarah Tothill. Sarah is going to do the food for my wedding.'

Willow shook hands with Sarah, a tall handsome woman in her early thirties, and, remembering the conversation at Richard's dinner, said something about knowing that Emma Gnatche had been working for her company.

‘She's such a good girl, and all the clients like her,' said Sarah, smiling. ‘I hate the thought of losing her when she goes off to university.'

‘I can imagine,' answered Willow, and was about to ask a question about the economics of private catering when Sarah's husband interrupted.

‘I think she's about the most irritating girl I've ever met,' he announced.

‘Little Emma?' cried Willow. ‘How can you think that? She didn't annoy you, did she, Ben?' she went on, turning to include her host in the conversation. He looked nonplussed for a moment until Willow reminded him that he had met Emma at Richard Crescent's dinner.

‘No,' he said after a moment's thought. ‘I think that as an example of the over-privileged and under-educated classes who own everything in this country, she was remarkably inoffensive.'

There was a sourness in that answer that Willow would not have expected from someone as kind as Ben, but, remembering her own reaction to Emma's unearned privileges when they had first met, she smiled at him. At least he had defended her protégée from Mark's gratuitous unpleasantness. She could not imagine what Emma could have done to provoke it.

‘What would you like to drink, Cressida?' asked Caroline, who clearly thought that they had talked enough about someone she hardly knew.

‘A glass of wine, please,' said Willow and looked interestedly round the room. She had seen that the house was a flat-fronted, early Victorian building as she was hurrying up the four steps to the front door, and had rather expected it to have been furnished in the familiar stripped pine and swagged curtain school of interior decoration.

The double drawing room was quite different from all her expectations. The walls were as starkly white as those of Tom Worth's flat, but there were no other similarities. Where his rooms were austere and minimally furnished, this one contained some remarkable things. There was a very fine marquetry chest against one of the long walls, rows and rows of books along the other, some exquisite Jacobite wine glasses arrayed along the chimneypiece, and some old-fashioned, overstuffed chairs and a sofa covered in dim cretonne. There was a fender stool upholstered in some attractive petit point, and as a final touch of eccentricity the curtains were of worn but superb antique silk brocade in a colour between red and orange and pink, which Willow recognised as ‘carnation'from her visit to Ham House.

‘What a wonderful room!' she said, looking up and down it.

‘Rather a jumble, I'm afraid,' said Caroline. ‘Simon would have hated it, but we both enjoy having things we like around us, whether they go together or not, don't we, Ben?'

‘It seems sensible,' he said, his voice gentle again. ‘And combining my glass and your tapestry would be impossible in any other kind of decor.'

‘Your tapestry?' said Willow curiously. ‘Do you do it yourself?'

‘Yes,' said Caroline with a slight blush. ‘I find it enormously therapeutic after days dealing with infuriating people. It calms me and slows me down and makes me sane again.'

Ben touched her cheek in a gesture of extraordinary tenderness and went out of the room saying something about fetching the wine.

‘There's lots more stuff to come, though,' said Caroline, recovering her complexion. ‘This is really the only room we've finished. We only moved in a month ago and haven't yet decorated the room where we're going to keep Ben's masque sets; they're exquisite and it's important that they don't get damaged.'

Willow was just about to ask more when Ben reappeared and handed her a glass of red wine. At Caroline's invitation Willow sat down in one of the big chairs between Sarah and her heavy-faced husband, who was smoking a small cigar, which Willow thought was quite as offensive as his remark about Emma had been.

‘I'm afraid it's only Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon,' said Caroline, watching Willow sip her wine.

‘There's nothing wrong with that,' said Willow, who always drank it herself in Clapham. She assumed that Caroline, who could obviously well afford better wine, had adjusted her tastes to her fiancé's means so as not to underline her financial superiority. On her left Mark said
sotto voce
:

‘Typical.'

Willow decided that he was either drunk or determined to be unpleasant and so she ignored him. Ben perched on the arm of Sarah's chair just then and told Willow that he had been reading one of her books. She smiled and said:

‘I don't think I'll ask you what you thought of it.' But he told her and she was both surprised and rather pleased that he had found in it several things to admire.

‘I thought you rather ran away from the possibilities of your heroine's relationship with her father,' he said after they had discussed the difficulties and delights of their craft.

‘I suppose I did,' answered Willow. ‘And I suppose that was because I get so bored with writers like me trotting out their fifth-hand psychobabble. I wanted to tell a story without any delving into childhood neuroses to explain adult motivation; but perhaps that was a mistake. Perhaps we're all so used to that now that we can't accept emotions as realistic unless they're rooted in such things.'

‘Surely all present emotion must be rooted in the past,' said Mark in protest. It was the first time he had spoken politely and so Willow looked at him with interest. ‘Whether you accept the views of psychoanalysts or not, you must agree with that. We must be what our pasts have made of us,' he went on.

‘I'm not sure that we are necessarily,' said Willow, relaxing. ‘I hate – and reject – the idea that the person that is me, the individuality, the core of me, is merely a product of what was done to me in childhood.'

‘It can't be only that,' said Ben, picking up a bowl of cashew nuts and offering them to Willow. ‘I'm as different as you could possibly imagine from the boy my mother brought me up to be. She lost both her brothers in the war and taught me to be as tough and manly and athletic as they were. But look at me!'

He gestured down at his gangly, rather shambling figure and laughed. The others laughed with him.

‘But the way that you think and react as an adult must have something to do with the way your parents treated you,' he went on. ‘That's only common sense.'

‘But it suggests that babies are born without characters … Can that be right?' asked Willow.

‘I wouldn't have thought so. Mark,' said Ben, turning to him, ‘you're the doctor. What's your view?'

‘Most people nowadays accept that certain aspects of personality are genetically determined,' he said, just as Willow was thinking: another doctor; I wonder if he knew Bruterley and Salcott. I wish I could ask all these people what I need to know directly instead of playing around with mock questions and speculation.

‘If they're right,' Mark continued, ‘then what Cressida believes is true …'

The ring of the doorbell interrupted him and heralded the arrival of Richard Crescent, hot and tired from a meeting with some of his clients and their lawyers. Willow would have been interested to dig deeper into what everyone thought about psychological motivation for actions in adulthood, but had to leave the subject.

‘No. I'd better not hold you up any more,' Richard said when Ben offered him a drink.

‘All right, let's eat,' said Caroline. ‘I ought to have asked you both, do you eat snails? I know that Sarah and Mark do, because she gave me the recipe; and Ben and I particularly like them, but I know lots of people don't.'

Richard enthusiastically and Willow politely assured her that they were happy to eat snails and all six of them went in to the kitchen to eat.

The snails were served in individual pottery plates, which Caroline said she had bought in Italy, and so Willow had no excuse to limit her helping. She choked down all six of her snails and quickly followed them with nuggets of hot french bread soaked in the garlic-and-parsley-flavoured butter that was the only pleasant aspect of the dish. A deep gulp of the smooth Bulgarian wine banished the memory of the chewy, wriggly-looking snails and she felt able to concentrate on conversation again.

It occurred to her that if she had not picked up Marcus Aurelius instead of Ben's book she would have been able to return his compliments about her novel. Thinking that he had little enough vanity not to mind that she had not read any of his books and that he might be amused by the story, she told him what had happened. He laughed happily and in his soft voice said: