Symposium (6 page)

‘No, as
a matter of fact, these days you know with the firms ready to take on
practically the whole wedding, it isn’t so very tiring. They do the flowers,
mail the invitations, set out the presents, everything. One only has to
supervise. The list of guests is always a problem. Your list isn’t so very
long, practically all friends of William.’

‘As I
wrote to you, mine are nearly all in Australia,’ said Hilda, sipping her
drink. ‘However those few who can come — it’ll be good to see them.’ And she
thought: William’s first wedding. There will be others.

She had
met Margaret in London. She didn’t think the marriage would last. That
goody-goody type of girl, how could she be real?

Hilda
had sat good-humouredly in their too-small flat and chatted as she noticed.

‘Marks
& Spencer’s fruit section. What on earth were you doing there, William?’

‘Buying
fruit,’ he said. ‘I always went there, it was convenient.’

‘And
you,’ she said to Margaret in her best Sandringham-type manner, ‘was that your
favourite fruit shop?’

‘No, I
was just there by chance.’ She gave a little smile, put her head on one side.
‘Lucky chance,’ she said.

William
sat there goggling at his bride-to-be as if she were a Miss Universe who had
taken a double first at Cambridge, or some such marvel.

‘I
shall give you a flat for a wedding present,’ Hilda had said. ‘That is all I
propose to do.’

‘Why,
it’s too much,’ said Margaret.

‘Very
generous,’ said William. After all, what could he say?

‘My parents’,
said Margaret, ‘are dying to meet you.

‘It’s a
most exciting occasion,’ Hilda had said, holding out her glass to William for
her drink to be repeated.

ABOUT
two weeks before the dinner party, Hurley Reed met Annabel Treece
unexpectedly at the television studios. Hurley had been attending a session as
adviser for a television play in which an artist was depicted. It was six in
the evening. Annabel had just finished her day’s work. She was normally a
documentary producer. They went to have a drink.

‘They
are talking about this artist character’s retiring,’ said Hurley. ‘All wrong.
Artists don’t retire. There’s nothing for them to retire about.’

‘I hope
you told them so,’ said Annabel who admired Hurley. ‘In a way it’s a waste of
your precious time, this advisory job.’

‘But I
like to see them do it right,’ Hurley said. ‘In this case, for instance, the
painter is not perpendicular enough. He shouldn’t be shown to look away from
the canvas to talk while his hand is painting with the brush. I like things
done right. Personally, if I were a butler or a valet I would do it right. I
would know how to do it.’

‘How
would you know?’ said Annabel. ‘Have you had the experience?’

‘Yes,
on the employer’s side,’ Hurley said. ‘Since I’ve been with Chris we’ve always
had a manservant or two.’

‘This
is something I’d like to hear more about, for when I do that TV profile of
you,’ said Annabel.

‘I’d
rather leave the butler out of it,’ said Hurley. ‘Quite honestly, for an artist
that sort of thing is counter-productive. At the other end of the scale, so is
starvation and garrets. If the public thinks you’re too well off they figure
the art must be superficial, and if you’re poor they think there’s something
wrong with the art, and why doesn’t it sell?’

But
Annabel was not to be waylaid. She was storing up an idea which she felt would
impress her superiors when it came to persuading them to take on her projected
profile of Hurley. About the observations he had just made, she was not concerned.
(Artist … butler … maybe include rich Australian consort … ) ‘What’s the
name of your butler?’ said Annabel.

‘Charterhouse,’
he said.

‘I
don’t believe it.’

‘Neither
did I,’ he said. ‘But it’s true, it’s on all his papers and references. We only
just hired him.’

‘Is he
any good?’

‘Perfect.
Except he already talks about wanting a few weeks off in the late fall.’

‘Did he
say “fall”?’ said quick Annabel.

‘No, he
said, “Autumn, sir.” He wants time off to take his Greek wife back to Greece
where she insists that she has to claim her dowry. I daresay that means twelve
sheets, six pillow-cases. They haven’t been married long, the fools.’

‘Do you
think marriage is foolish?’

Hurley
ignored this. ‘Chris is going to let him go on vacation. But first we’re
counting on him for a few occasions, including a dinner. After that, let him go
to Greece. A small dinner, we thought, rather special.’

‘Chris
invited me, I was thrilled,’ said Annabel.

He
enumerated the list of guests, some of whom she hadn’t met.

‘It
sounds charming,’ she said.

‘They
will constitute an interesting cocktail,’ Hurley said. ‘That’s what one asks of
a dinner party.’

‘And
I’m looking forward to seeing Charter-house,’ Annabel said.

‘Nothing
special to see,’ said Hurley. He smiled at Annabel and paid the bill for their
drinks.

To her
cousin Roland Sykes with whom she had supper that night Annabel said, ‘I hear
you’re going to Chris Donovan’s dinner party.’

‘I’ve
been asked. I don’t know if I can manage, ‘he said, as he always said; to the
effect that she took no notice.

‘I met
Hurley,’ she said. ‘He told me who’s coming. There’s a newly married couple;
he’s the son of that magnate tycoon woman, Mrs Damien, an Australian; you
remember there was an article about her in one of the Sunday supplements. Her
son got married to a girl called Margaret Murchie from St Andrews. Hurley says
they met in Marks & Spencer’s, the fruit section.’

‘Murchie?’
said Roland.

‘Well,
it’s an old Scottish name.’

‘I
know. From St Andrews, you said?’

Annabel’s
cousinship to Roland was from the mother’s side, his from the father’s. They
both had brothers and sisters, but Annabel and Roland were much closer to each
other than to any other members of their family. Annabel was more than five
years his senior. Their devotion dated back to their teens, when he was
fourteen, she nineteen. They would have married or been lovers, certainly, had
Roland not from his teens been sexually attracted to men more than he was to
women. Roland shared a large flat with a busy journalist towards whom he was
friendly without further complications; the flatmate always had a girl-friend
to stay some nights and all weekends but the spaciousness of the flat made it
easy for Roland to avoid them. He felt very comfortable at home. But it was to
Annabel that he brought his sorrows and griefs. He had for some years been
thinking and deciding whether he should come down, finally,‘ on one side’ as he
put it, meaning that he wanted to give up homosexuality and get married. It was
not easy in the sense that it was a course of action easier to decide, and even
to attempt to put into practice, than to realize, for he had been known as a
homosexual, and the sort of girls he would have liked to marry were not, so
far, available to him. These woes he fully confided to Annabel, since there was
now no question of romantic love between them. It was too late. Their
relationship had set into an abiding family closeness. The thought of going to
bed with her cousin Roland would not have pleased Annabel, while for his part,
in his present state of mind, he would have thought her too old. They were, all
the same, dearer to each other than most cousins, most sisters and brothers,
are to each other.

Roland
was by profession a genealogist, an honest one, much as he was sometimes
tempted to soar into the clouds of mythology to clinch his findings. He worked
for a large firm of private investigators whose main activity was spying on
lovers and tracing missing people. But a substantial profit was made by
Roland’s branch of the business. He traced people’s ancestry. Mostly those
were people who had made a lot of money and who felt they must be, or might be,
descendants of some distinguished house or family or person; also, in many
cases, they wanted some form of crest and motto to put on their dinner forks
and spoons or to have engraved on their signet rings.

Members
of the Church of the Mormons or Latter-day Saints were particularly good
clients for genealogists in England; from Utah alone came substantial revenues,
since descendance from Joseph Smith or one of their enlightened founders was
considered by them to be a personal asset.

One way
and another Roland was kept busy. He knew where to look for documents, what
public record offices, what historical archives and where the papers were kept,
what parish registers, throughout the country, and he was familiar with emblems
of heraldry, those still flourishing and current and those which were extinct.
He was also an excellent paleographer, so that he could decipher the
peculiarities of handwriting, spelling and the varying dialects of scribes,
clerks, clergy, lawyers, judges and country gentlemen dead long and many
centuries since. And he was honest in this: he exploded as many false claims of
pedigree as he discovered true ones. But in the process of explaining, not much
was in fact quite straightforward: there were areas of doubt. Roland was firm
about expressing doubts where doubts existed, and if the clients wanted to give
themselves the benefit of the doubt that was their business.

In
Annabel’s brown and green sitting-room Roland waited for Annabel’s dinner to
announce itself ready by the ping of a timer bell. He said, looking into his
drink and swirling it round, ‘Murchies of St Andrews?’

‘You
know the family?’ said Annabel.

Roland,
an extremely busy young man, did not normally know families as such. Like specialist
doctors he had to consult his records if clients came back saying they had been
to him before. He had an efficient computer service at his disposal. But his
natural memory usually told him a lot.

‘There
was something about the Murchies last year. I’m sure it was St Andrews,’ he
said. ‘But of course, the details … I’ll have to check. I did some research,
yes, but there was something else. They wanted to claim a fortune but didn’t
succeed in the courts, it was all in the papers. It need not be the same
family.’

‘We’ll
meet the girl on the 18th.’

‘I’m
not sure I can go.’

‘Oh
yes, love, you can go to the dinner. If there’s anything nice in this world
it’s Chris and Hurley’s dinners. But I want you there so we can talk about it
afterwards.’

Ping,
ping, went the cooking bell. Annabel sidled into her kitchen, then called
Roland, ‘Supper’s ready!’

Suddenly
he thought: What, what, would I do without Annabel?

She
said, ‘You’ve changed your hair-style.’ Normally his hair was dark, with a
side parting. Now he had it cut brush-like sticking up a little on top of his
head, very short at the sides, and silvered.

‘It’s a
change,’ he said.

‘I
wouldn’t think it would persuade a woman that you’ve changed,’ said Annabel.

‘To a
young girl today it means neither one thing nor another,’ said Roland.

‘It
would mean something to me,’ said Annabel, ‘and I’m not so old.’ She was
thirty-two, he twenty-seven.

‘I’ll
try it out for a while,’ Roland said. ‘Maybe you’re right. If so, I wonder
why?’

‘It
looks as if you’ve spent hours and hours at the hairdresser,’ Annabel said.

‘So I
did,’ he said.

‘And it
will grow out quickly. You’ll have to spend more hours keeping it up. I don’t
say’, she said, ‘that it doesn’t look good. It makes you look decidedly
attractive.’

‘Thanks.
I’m glad to know it. I was getting bored with myself.’

‘You
belong to the eighteenth century,’ she said. ‘The men were obsessed by their
hair and their wigs. You can see by the portraits. Psychologically, you are
eighteenth century.’