The Malcontents (18 page)

Tess, who had met her only occasionally, watched her as she became relaxed, though still she had one leg entwined in the other. She was wearing a plain black-and-white office dress, and looking singularly beautiful, with the kind of beauty which is much rarer than very high intelligence or Olympic-class ability at the 400 metres. Tess felt a pang of jealousy. She needn’t have. Stephen had noticed her looks since the two of them were grown up, and like everyone else admired them: he liked her much more than most people did: he thought she was clever and fundamentally kind. But, almost without consideration, he – like other young men with their share of sexual confidence or intuition – knew that she was not for him.

‘Well!’ she said, gulping at her glass. ‘I have some news for you.’

‘What?’ asked Stephen, but she was talking, eyes staring, straight at Mark.

‘On the whole, it’s good news. Yes, I think it is. I hope you think so too.’ Her tone was clear and competent, and also submissive: she was issuing bulletins, and also so anxious to please him.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ Mark broke out. He was astonished, so were the others. It was absolute astonishment, so complete, so instantaneous, cutting across the grain of their mood, that, though they felt surprise like a physical shock, their original dread – the apprehension, the fear of that afternoon, even the ennui – continued to weigh upon them, even to go on developing new disquiet.

‘It is more or less all right. For you anyway.’ She had a thought for Stephen and Tess. ‘And you two as well. It’s more or less all right.’

‘That can’t be.’ A mechanical response from Stephen.

‘Listen. It’s turned out better than anyone imagined. It may have turned out better for the wrong reasons, but you’ll have to put up with that.’

In fact, though her belief hadn’t sunk deep, nevertheless Stephen and Mark had believed her straight away. She was happy to bring Mark good news, radiantly happy: but they trusted her sense, she was as competent – and more legally minded – than they were. While to Stephen there was a half-conscious thought: investing so many hopes in her love for Mark, so brilliant, so fragile, she would never have dared raise false hopes in him, or even any hopes that stood a chance of proving false. More than that, underneath the shrinking nerve-ends, underneath the classical façade, Stephen accepted her as someone solid, and trusted her as he might have done the lawyer Hotchkinson. The day before, he had concealed nothing from her, accepting that she was discreet. Although he did not know it, she had been discreet that afternoon. Mark’s explanation for her late arrival was ingenious, true to her character, but wrong: she wasn’t so punctilious that she wouldn’t have slipped out of the office to transmit news like this. The reason was much more businesslike: until all was over, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

‘They’re letting you off the hook. You three and Emma,’ she said, voice high and crisp. ‘It makes sense, so far as they’re concerned,’ she went on. ‘They’ve got you exactly where they want you. After what happened last night, they can kill your plans stone-dead. They never did want to come out in the open, if they could avoid it. The less fuss the better, so long as they could shut you up so that no one would listen to you. Well. They’ll take Forrester and St John for drugs, that’s all they needed. If there’s any evidence that Kelshall took drugs too, that’s a bonus. What with an inquest and a couple of drug charges, they’re untouchable. So they’re playing it cool. They can’t see any reason for bothering about you.’

Most of this explanation she delivered, not to Mark, but to Stephen, and her tone became changed into one friendly and astringent. She was being quite lucid: so much so that on the plane of intellect Stephen could already predict – and accurately – a good deal of the practical future. As he was listening, Tess was in his field of vision: she had blushed dark: was she, like him, suffused with cowardly relief? Relief which swept through him, taking control like an anaesthetic. Shame that it could be so cowardly: there were liabilities in parallel, that he couldn’t miss. Yet the relief was overmastering. Cowardly relief and shame.

‘Plan B2 can’t work now,’ said Sylvia. She wasn’t asking them, she was informing them. Stephen acquiesced. If anyone tried it, their allies, such as they were, in politics and the press would be frightened off. Maybe their enemies had already done the frightening. Their intelligence (Sylvia had just used one of the secret operational terms) was exact. Whoever had been a traitor had been an efficient one. ‘It’s all right, I tell you.’ Sylvia gazed round with great eyes, happy to be looking after them, happy to be in command. ‘It’s cut-and-dried. They won’t worry you any more.’ She fixed her gaze, suddenly diffident, on Mark and said, tentative and like an adolescent girl offering a gift: ‘Is that something nice for you? I hope it is.’

Mark said gently: ‘You’ve been very good.’

At another time Stephen would have wished her luck, troubled that she was so defenceless. But that night in the drawing-room it was too incongruous to be borne, splintering the respite and the shadows beyond it, utterly incongruous with the authority she had brought them. She sat there, the bones of her face sculptured, body composed by now, the fine skin blooming. In a brusque impatient manner, Stephen told her: ‘You said that they were going to take Neil St John for drugs.’

‘I did.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘Is it? You’ll see.’

‘He’s as innocent as we are.’

‘They don’t agree. Of course I don’t know him.’

‘That doesn’t completely eliminate him from the human race, you know.’

It wasn’t an unfriendly gibe: it took her back to dances two or three years before, when she was too shy to meet young men outside her own acquaintances. She gave an indrawn, apologetic laugh.

‘I’ve only met him once. With you,’ she said to Mark. ‘I must say, I thought he was pretty awful.’

‘He’s not.’ Tess was angry, ready to dislike her, ready to believe her snobbish. But she was sisterly to Tess, at ease with her as she wasn’t with men.

‘Well, you know him and I don’t. I take your word for it. That doesn’t affect the issue, though. They’ve got him.’

‘This can’t be right,’ said Stephen.

‘You’ll see,’ she repeated.

‘Sylvia dear, you’ll have to spell it out,’ said Mark.

‘It’s very simple.’ As before, she was incisive about facts. ‘They collected enough stuff from Forrester’s place last night to fix him. That’s laid on. They’re hoping that the post-mortem will show some signs in Kelshall, but they’re not putting too much faith in that. As for St John, they made a search there today–’

‘We’ve heard that.’

‘I couldn’t find out whether they’d picked up anything. But they have another string. That Jamaican of yours, what’s his name, Finlayson is prepared to swear–’

‘What do you mean?’ Tess cried.

‘Just that the pair of them, Forrester and St John, were flogging marijuana in that precious street.’

‘Would anyone in his senses believe a word,’ said Stephen, ‘that that crook said?’

‘I thought you were all willing to. Not so long ago.’ She spoke without malice, but firmly, giving her first hint of scruple and distaste.

‘I think that’s fair comment,’ said Mark very lightly.

‘This is a filthy business,’ said Tess.

‘Yes. You walked into it pretty deep, though, didn’t you?’

Stephen interrupted (echoing an old-fashioned term of his father’s): ‘You’re telling us that Neil St John is going to be framed, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

She had by this time more control and poise than any of them.

‘I’m not in a position to be certain of that. I can tell you, they have some security information about him. They can’t use that–’

‘That’s his politics.’

‘Maybe. It doesn’t make them less anxious to get him. And they will.’

‘He’s absolutely innocent in this drug business. You must believe us.’

Stephen’s voice was strained and harsh, hers cool in reply.

‘If you say so, then I think I do.’

‘We can’t let him go into this alone. We shall have to say so.’ In the middle of the first blaze of relief, this had been a shadow, sharp-edged now.

‘That’s your responsibility.’ Then she said, with a curious awkward softness: ‘But please, please, don’t stretch it any further than you must. Please don’t stretch yourself too far.’ With the same awkwardness, injected now with humility, she spoke to Tess, as though the other two were not present: ‘You can say things to him I can’t, perhaps you can influence him. Please don’t let him stretch himself too far. He can’t be responsible for everything.’

Just for the moment, Sylvia seemed more concerned for Stephen than for Mark: perhaps understanding him better, because loving him less. In the medley of the wealthy, untasteful, indifferent room, in the confusion of moral impressions, Tess was half-recollecting that she had listened to two people that day begging Stephen to define the limits of responsibility – both of them speaking with the same insight, the same kindness, her own father, whom she loved, and this cold superior young woman, whom she envied and didn’t wish to like.

‘That sounds too easy,’ said Stephen.

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘If you’d like us to let everything happen–’

‘Yes. If you can’t do any good.’ She went on: ‘I’m trying to think how you feel. I’m not much of a one for having comrades, you know. I couldn’t have got into your kind of game. But still – if you can’t do any good? That doesn’t seem serious. It doesn’t even seem high-minded. Not really.’

She gave a slight inward smile, not mocking. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you haven’t done much good up to now.’

Stephen answered: ‘Someone died last night.’

‘I know.’ It wasn’t the fact she was acknowledging, but the expression on the faces round her: faces dark and closed. Then she said: ‘Well. It was a quick death.’

It might have sounded affectless: but in her aseptic fashion she was trying to console them (the most habitual consolation, the nature of death, the only one which Stephen could offer Bernard’s parents). She was exactly Stephen’s age, but as they had talked she began to appear older – not maternal, for that wasn’t in her nature, but more like a sharp-witted spinster, or even a male whose own life was behind him but who wished them well. Certainly, Tess was thinking, half-passionately resentful, half-longing that he was being moved, Stephen was taking more from the girl than he had ever done from her. He began to speak to her with an off-hand intimacy: ‘You may as well know. We’re not sure that it was altogether an accident.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘It’s only a suspicion. But he may not have known what he was doing. He may have been drugged.’

She stared at him.

‘He may have been drugged on purpose,’ said Stephen. ‘I mean, some madman may have thought it was a good idea. I suppose as a kind of practical joke or a nice parlour trick.’ He said it without relenting.

‘I wonder,’ said Sylvia.

‘We thought it was Lance Forrester who did it,’ Stephen continued, ‘but that may not be right.’ There was silence.

‘It’s a pity,’ said Stephen, ‘but it’s possible we shall never know who it was.’

‘I can’t help you there,’ Sylvia said. She was wearing her inward-looking smile or tic, neither mocking nor amused. ‘I fancy though if you had to lose anyone the way Kelshall went – he was the one you could best spare.’

‘How can you say that?’ burst out Tess.

‘Oh, I meant to tell you, but it wasn’t as important as the rest. He was the one who gave you away.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ Tess gave that loud angry cry.

‘You’ll have to. It’s true.’ Sylvia then spoke softly to Mark: ‘I’d have told you yesterday, but I wasn’t positive. I wasn’t keeping anything back.’ She turned back to the others. ‘I found out for certain this morning. He was working for them from the beginning.’

While Tess was still protesting, and also breaking out ‘Oh, why?’ Stephen said, in a stern oppressed tone, to Sylvia: ‘This isn’t just an opinion, is it? You actually know?’

‘I shouldn’t have said anything unless I did. You must realize that.’

She asked Mark: ‘You do, don’t you?’

‘How long was he working for them?’ To Stephen, the detail seemed imperative, just as to someone jealous in love.

‘Almost from the time you started.’

‘God,’ said Stephen, and added flatly: ‘I must say, I’m surprised.’

‘I’m not in the least surprised,’ said Mark, his eyes flashing.

Yet, apart from that flash of excitement from Mark, Sylvia was astonished – at a loss as she hadn’t been before – to find that their mood had become almost instantaneously more sombre, perhaps more corroded, than since she entered the room. She had expected the news to be of interest, but not to stir them like the good news she had brought. But the emotional air had turned passionate, in the oldest sense. That she couldn’t help but feel. She couldn’t perceive why the fact – a fact she had thought assimilated – of being betrayed should hurt them so much: or why the fact of knowing who had betrayed them was worse, seared deeper, than when it was left unknown. For herself, she would have declared, she would choose certainty rather than mystery, in any circumstances, any trouble, at any time. Perhaps she had still to learn.

The mood wasn’t broken, but jagged into, by a patch of house logistics. Mark had offered to ‘organize’ supper. That seemed matter-of-fact and easy: it would have been so at Thomas Freer’s. But this wasn’t Thomas Freer’s. In his father’s absence, Mark was supposed to be looked after by a housekeeper and a maid. He was at his most spontaneous and most tender with them, he talked to them, listened to their worries, ferried them into the town. They were fond of him, called him by his Christian name, and did as little for him as they could. Each vacation, he lived as though he were camping out in this big house. That evening, both housekeeper and maid came into the drawing-room and argued as a matter of right that there was no food at all. Mark was patient and apologetic. There must be some food, it didn’t matter what it was. At last, with the same air of righteousness, a tin of corned beef was produced, a loaf, a hunk of cheese, and a little butter. Mark gave grateful thanks. He went away himself, and managed to discover a couple of bottles of claret. That they drank along with their corned beef, apart from Sylvia, who pointed to the gin bottle and said she would stick to this. None of them realized that the wine was splendid. None of them – interruption aside – had found anything specially absurd in the domestic scene. Even Sylvia, not so egalitarian by principle as they were, used to a well-run house, though not one as wealthy as this, was a child of her time as much as they were, and wasn’t comfortable about having servants, much less about disbelieving them.