Symposium (8 page)

‘It
looks very fishy,’ said Eunice. ‘I feel bad about it. Peter won’t like it.’

‘We
don’t like it,’ said Greta. ‘Your father and I feel it looks so bad. But what
can we do about it?’

‘It was
Margaret’s idea, then?’ Eunice said.

‘Yes.
Well, no. To change the will was your Uncle Magnus’s idea.’

‘Oh,
God. If the press gets hold of this, there’s going to be trouble. It’s all so
bad, in my condition.’

Jean,
the youngest daughter, still at school, had been sent to a convent in Liège the
Monday following the fatal Sunday when Mrs Murchie senior was murdered. Greta
had been to school in this convent. Jean, a hankerer after adventure, went
willingly, quite unaware of the cause of her grandmother’s death. It was at
Liège, that innocent and beautiful city, that young Jean was to encounter a
certain Paul, eighteen years old, son of an old Belgian school friend of
Greta’s, preparing to be what he himself called a Eurocrat. Eventually Jean was
to have a child by Paul and to live lovingly with him year in, year out; but
that is another story, or would be but for the mere fact that her destiny was
contingent upon the murder of her grandmother and her having been packed off
quickly to those faithful nuns at Liège.

Dan’s favourite among his
children was Margaret. It was a passion that he mutely controlled. Dan could
sit for hours simply watching Margaret. Wherever she went, his eyes followed
her as far as they could. He watched her reading, marvelling over the bloom of
her lovely complexion. He thought her intelligent, too original to be
appreciated.

‘Someone
put that maniac up to killing my mother,’ Dan said to Greta.

‘It
must have been Magnus. It must be,’ said Greta. ‘They say there was no contact
between Magnus’s wing and the dangerous cases. That’s what they say, it’s what
they always say, what else can they say?’

‘He
knew the will had been changed.’

‘Someone
must have told him,’ said Greta.

‘Yes, I
believe Margaret told him. She rang him up in the home and she said he’d be
glad to know the will was changed as he suggested. Apparently, he was
delighted. And if Margaret was mixed up in this, I’m stunned,’ said Dan.

‘I’m
not,’ said Greta. ‘And there’s no “if” about it. She sent Waters to change your
mother’s will in your favour, and then told Magnus. That’s being mixed up.’

Margaret
turned up that night. She had a few days off from her job as a ceramics
designer in Glasgow. Her parents looked at her with fear, in a new way, not
quite knowing her for the first time in their lives. Dan said, ‘I wonder how
Magnus got to know that psychotic woman? It must have been Magnus who sent
her.’

‘But
supposing it wasn’t?’ said Margaret. ‘Aren’t you doing Uncle Magnus a great
injustice? You have no proof at all.’

‘That’s
what I say,’ said Greta, although it wasn’t at all what she had been saying.

‘And
then’, said Dan, ‘she had only just changed her will, and Magnus knew it.’

‘But
she didn’t change it in his favour,’ Margaret said. ‘Don’t you see, Granny cut
him completely out. Nobody could accuse him of killing Granny for her money.
They say in the hospital that he’s very upset. Won’t move out of his bed.’

‘Have
you been in touch with the hospital authorities?’

‘No,
the police have. And they were in touch with me,’ said Margaret.

‘What
for?’ said Dan.

‘About
the will.’

‘Oh,
God,’ said Greta, ‘the will isn’t our fault. It was natural that she should
make a new will, wasn’t it, after all these years?’

The
police apparently thought so, too, or were obliged to recognize that
possibility. The official enquiry at Jeffrey King mental home led to nothing
but some recommendations for tighter control. There was no trial. The
strangler, found unfit to plead as indeed she was unfit to utter any consecutive
sense or implication, and more victim than brute, was sent to an institution
for the criminal mad. The press went on to more intense and exciting things and
would have stopped giving up even a paragraph to the case had Dan’s married
sister who lived in Kenya not decided to challenge the will. She had flown home
for the funeral. She now mobilized her two unmarried sisters in favour of a
theory of ‘undue influence’ having been put on her mother on her sick-bed by
the interested party, Dan. There was no way in which they could prove anything
against Dan or Margaret. The nurses were in perfect accord that Mrs Murchie
had, on her own, asked Margaret to send the lawyer in to see her, and Mr Waters
himself insisted indignantly that Mrs Murchie had made a new will of her own
volition and while in her right mind. Dan settled the business out of court, as
he had in any case intended to do, while the sisters stomped in and out of their
late mother’s flat in Edinburgh, removing things, assessing things, parcelling
them out amongst themselves.

Dan had
never had much to say to his mother; he was at a loss. What had affected him at
his mother’s funeral was the actual sight of her coffin, the sight of that
brown coffin, that box. Now, he was amazed at her daughters’ looting her goods
—her daughters, one of whom had been extremely devoted.

‘Surely
we should have a say in all this?’ said Margaret. ‘It would be good to remind
them of your rights.’

‘Yes,
good. But at this particular moment it would look bad,’ said Dan. ‘Our hands
are tied.’

It was
the end of October. ‘Was it Undue Influence?’, ‘Magnus Murchie: Nothing Can
Bring My Mother Back’, went the headlines. An editorial in a more sober paper
pointed out that the days of witch-hunts were over. Nothing could be gained by
persecuting the Murchie family. Plainly, the murder had not been planned by the
interested party, her son Daniel. Equally obvious was it that the will had been
changed in the ordinary course of the unfortunate Mrs Murchie’s illness: she
had not changed her will for fifty years. What more logical than that she would
wish to leave her fortune to the son who was of right mind? Her three
daughters, who, it was understood, in a prior action decided to contest the
will, had now withdrawn their case. The question had been settled out of
court. Reasonable people might now agree to leave the Murchies to their grief.

The
fuss blew over by the end of the year. Dan developed eye-strain and wore dark
glasses nearly all day, even in the Scottish winter. Greta paid up her racing
debts; got her brooch out of pawn, and sent cheques to Flora and Eunice,
lamenting the fact that their aunts, by contesting their grandmother’s will,
had ‘robbed’ them. ‘Think how much more we could have done as a family’, wrote
Greta, ‘if those aunts of yours hadn’t been so avaricious. Margaret is
wonderful. She refuses to touch a penny of her grandmother’s fortune. She says
she’s happier that way.’

The
fuss blew over, and two years later, when Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan were
planning their dinner party, and various of their friends were discussing the
newly married William Damien and Margaret, the Murchies’ name was only
something a few of them remembered seeing in the papers. Murchie or some name
like that. Some scandal, but probably, anyway, not the same Murchies as
Margaret’s family.

‘If
there is anything I could not bear to do,’ said Margaret to her father, ‘it is
to profit by darling Granny’s death.’

Dan
looked at his daughter through his dark glasses, as a rabbit might look at a
stoat: dismay, fear, despair. If she had been greedy for her grandmother’s
money, now her father’s, at least he could have understood. But beautiful
Margaret was here detaching herself from any blame. But was she to blame? Dan
felt, not with his mind, but deeply within the marrow of his bones, that she had
sent the maniac to her grandmother.

‘Not a
penny would I touch,’ said Margaret. Dan went cold. He was sure his daughter
meant it.

Magnus
again came to St Andrews for the Sunday, dressed in his gaudy clothes. ‘Let’s
go for a walk,’ said Dan; which was unusual, for it was known he didn’t like to
be seen with Magnus, dressed like that. Who would? Only Margaret. She didn’t
care what Uncle Magnus looked like.

They
possessed a stretch of woodland, narrow but long. Greta from the window saw
them walking between the trees, with large Magnus’s bright blues and reds
flashing. She thought perhaps it was time, now that the financial side was
settled, that Dan gave up Magnus as a guru and a guide. It was weakness on
Dan’s part; madness. They were not a mentally stable family, those Murchies.

What
Dan was consulting his brother about, there in the woods walking along the edge
of the dank pond, was Margaret. ‘Do you think her capable of murdering Mama?’

‘I
think her capable of anything,’ roared Magnus. ‘An extremely capable girl, very
full of ability, power.’

‘But
murder? Provoking a murder? Causing someone else to do it?’

‘Oh,
that, yes, I dare say.’

‘Magnus,
this is completely beyond me. It’s terrible. She refuses to touch any of our
money, now. She won’t touch her grandmother’s money, not a penny.’

‘She is
naturally a girl of high principle. I would have expected that.’

‘Sometimes
I wonder, Magnus, if you advise us right.’

‘Who
else have you got?’ Magnus bellowed. ‘Third-rate lawyers, timid little bankers
from London. No guide whatsoever for a Scot.’

‘Magnus,
keep your voice lower. Hush it.’ Magnus lowered his voice. ‘Who do you have’,
he said, ‘but me? Out of my misfortune, out of my affliction I prognosticate
and foreshadow. My divine affliction is your only guide. Remember the ballad:

As I went down the water side

None but my foe to be my guide

None but my foe to be my guide.’

‘Perhaps’, said Dan, ‘you
can’t be a friend. Maybe in fact you’re our worst enemy. It may be.’

‘Undoubtedly,’
said Magnus. ‘In families, one never knows.’

‘What I
am wondering,’ said Dan, ‘is if Margaret is sane.’

‘Probably
not. Perhaps she inherited something wild from me. Is it time for a drink?’

‘Yes,
and then I have to take you back, right away.’

THERE
was probably nothing more pleasant in the whole of London than the
charming love between Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan. They were both convinced
that marriage would have spoiled everything for them, and undoubtedly they were
right. Hurley was nothing like so wealthy as Chris; as a husband he would have
felt diminished, the smaller partner; as it was, the question of greater or
smaller didn’t arise. For her part, Chris felt younger not being married, she
had been married and had got used to always having a man to keep her company
and talk to, but now she was a widow, and rich, she really enjoyed the
single-woman feeling, with Hurley as a companion. She found him very
entertaining. He depended on her a great deal for the material props to his
career; after all, he was not a great artist, he was in a way too much of a
thinker to be a true and full-blooded painter, not that he was a big thinker,
either; he was an interesting man with some talent. His liaison with Chris had
lasted seventeen years, and was still doing very well at the time of the dinner
party they were planning, the latest of so many dinner parties they had planned
and given.

‘Do you
remember’, said Hurley, ‘that dinner we gave, something like — it must be
fifteen years ago, when that girl got up at the end of the meal and raised her
hands to heaven, invoking the Lord to bless us all? It was an amazing
performance.’

‘The
Chilean Ambassador was there,’ said Chris. ‘You didn’t see his face but I did.’

‘I did
see his face. What was the name of the girl —?‘ said Hurley.

‘Beatrice,
Beatrice … Wademacher. No, Rademacher. She was that daughter, remember, of
Rademacher.’

‘That’s
right. It was some time in the ‘seventies, mid-’seventies, when the Charismatic
Revival was on. She said, “I think we should now pray and ask the Lord to bless
us one by one.” And she went on to name us all, didn’t she?’