The Perfect Daughter (6 page)

But Bill didn't take his own advice. We both ran over. The air round the crowd was heavy with beer fumes. They were mostly young men and a few girls, having some holiday fun as they saw it, but once they'd started it was taking them over, growing vicious. As they chanted and pushed against the cart it rocked almost off its wheels. Another few heaves and it would be over with the the two people and a cauldron of boiling water inside. I shouted to the crowd to stop it but it did no good. Bill grabbed a couple of men by the collar and dragged them aside, so of course they turned on him. For once in my life I was glad to hear a police whistle shrilling and see navy-blue uniforms. Bill's attackers melted away. He took my arm and dragged me to one side.

‘Just let them get on with it.'

The police didn't even need to use their truncheons and nobody hung around to be arrested. In a few minutes all that was left to show there'd been trouble was an area of scuffed grass with burst sausages trampled into it. The Blacks were still inside the cart, the woman sobbing and trembling, the man apparently arguing with the police who didn't seem sympathetic. We watched as a policeman escorted the man to fetch his donkey from where it was tethered under a tree and stood over him while he harnessed it to the cart. The woman emptied the cauldron on to the grass, stowed away the mustard jar and they rolled off towards the road. Some of the drunks cheered from a distance as they went.

Bill and I followed the cart out to the road and watched it going slowly down the hill. We'd both had enough of the Heath and the holiday, although it was still only midday.

I said, ‘I suppose I could go to the student house this afternoon, get it over with.'

*   *   *

I hadn't intended Bill to come with me, but he seemed to take it for granted that he would and I was feeling too down to argue. We decided to take the underground into the centre of town. While we waited on the platform Bill asked: ‘You're hoping her friends might give you some idea why she killed herself?'

A train was coming, which saved me from having to answer. Bill had been through enough already today. I couldn't bring myself to tell him something that had been growing in my mind since I found her. Supposing the question wasn't ‘why' but ‘if'?

Chapter Five

T
HE STUDENT HOUSE WHERE I'D LAST SEEN VERONA
alive was in one of the small streets behind Cheyne Walk in the stretch between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, close enough to the river to hear seagulls and smell the mud when the tide was out. It was mid afternoon when we got there after a walk along Chelsea Embankment, not saying much. I wished, to be honest, that Bill weren't there but after what he'd done for us, I could hardly tell him to go away. I hadn't paid much attention to the outside of the house on my other visits, beyond noting that it looked run-down, so before we went in I stood with Bill on the pavement opposite and had a good look at it. The general impression was of a house that hadn't woken up yet, even on a holiday afternoon. There were curtains drawn over the downstairs windows, yellowed linings turned to the street. The sash windows of the two upstairs storeys were closed, one of them pinning down a thin blue towel hung out to dry, flapping languidly in the breeze coming from the river. The sill next to it, with cream paint flaking off the stonework, supported a milk bottle and a dead geranium in a pot that looked as if it would slide down into the street at any moment.

‘Probably all out,' Bill said, sounding unconcerned.

We crossed the street. The front door, probably blue once, had faded to grey blistered with paint bubbles from sunnier days than this one. The knocker was broken, hanging from one side. I knocked, waited, and knocked again.

‘Who's there?' It was a man's voice, with a foreign accent.

‘Verona's cousin.'

Father's cousin, but too complicated to explain that through a closed door. A long silence then, ‘She's not here.'

The voice was lazy, a little hostile, as if he'd just been woken up. Bill looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

‘May we come in, please?'

Another silence, then much fiddling with bolts or catches, and a curse in a language I didn't recognise at first. I'm usually good at foreign curses. By the time the door opened I'd had a chance to think about it. Standing there, eyes half closed, looking far from pleased to see us, was the silent man who'd been sketching Verona with such intense interest. He was older than I'd realised, probably nearer thirty than twenty, and had a world-weary air as if he'd just woken up from a sleep centuries long and found nothing changed. He wore white flannel trousers stained with paint, held up with an even more stained piece of rag knotted round the waistband, a parody of the way university rowing types use their college ties to hold up their trousers. His feet were bare, his toes unusually long and slender and bent like bird's talons as if he needed to keep a good grip on the floor. The dark hair flopping over his forehead looked as if it hadn't been washed in a long time. I thought, with a little stab of loss, that when I was silly and romantic and Verona's age I'd have found him attractive, then with a stab of something else that I refused to recognise I realised that I still did. He pushed his hair back with fingers yellowed with nicotine – elegant fingers though – and stared at us from half-shut eyes as if wondering whether we were worth the trouble of getting in focus. He managed at the same time to be half asleep and so arrogant that I could sense Bill going tense with dislike.

I said ‘Good afternoon' to him politely – in Hungarian. His dark eyes opened wide and focused. He said, ‘Who are you?' also in Hungarian. I said in English, ‘As I told you, Verona's relative. May we come in?' I only knew five phrases of Hungarian and we'd already got through two of them. Still, it had been enough to wake him up. He turned his back and took a few steps into the passage, leaving the door open. I followed. Bill came behind me and closed the door. The dark man went up the stairs without looking back, into a room on the right. It was where I'd last talked to Verona and seemed to be a common room for everybody in the house. At the time, it had struck me as a cheerful creative sort of place, but today it felt like the inside of dustbin. A thick green blind was drawn over the window. There was a smell of linseed oil, stale beer and wine, and cigarette smoke. Something else too, a smell of human bodies and stale sweat.

‘Must have been quite a party,' Bill said, sounding unconcerned. I realised that he was talking to me because the dark man had gone. We could hear his bare feet padding back downstairs.

‘We'll just get Verona's things and go.'

The Hungarian had said, ‘She's not here.' Did he know why? It seemed an age since I'd found Verona, but it was only two days ago.

Bill walked to the window and took hold of the blind. It went up with a rattle like a goods train and something in the room gave a screech of protest. Bill spun round and in other circumstances I'd have laughed at the expression on his face. There was a beautiful half-naked woman lying on the chaise-longue. It was the same broken down chaise-longue where I'd seen Verona posing. The woman had long dark hair, legs bare to the upper thigh and just covered there with a rucked-up net petticoat, white breasts spilling out of a flesh-coloured chemise. You could have toasted bread on Bill's blush. He backed towards the door, started apologising. The woman, entirely unworried, sat up, pulled down her petticoat and stretched like a lazy lioness.

‘Ah, I see you've met Maria.'

The Hungarian was back, bringing with him the young man with the ginger beard, the orange juggler. He too looked as if he'd had a long night and while the dark man carried himself with a kind of jaded glamour, Ginger-beard simply looked ill. His round amiable face was pale, his eyes bloodshot, his hair wet as if he'd just dunked his head in a basin of water. Still, he had the manners of a polite schoolboy and came towards me with his hand out.

‘Miss Bray, isn't it? Verona's aunt.'

I didn't argue. It was horribly clear now that I'd have to break the news to them.

‘I don't think she introduced me last time. Toby's my name. Toby Menteith. That's Maria, as you've heard, and this is Count something-or-other I can't pronounce, known to his friends, police and creditors as Rizzo, as in Bloated Arist-o-crat.'

The Hungarian didn't respond. He was rangeing around the room looking for something.

‘Cur, did we drink all the wine?'

‘We did, Rizzo. We drank all the wine in the whole wide world.' He explained to us, ‘I'm Cur, as in Dog Toby.'

Bill was looking at a mural on the wall behind Toby. It was done in black, white and greys, a man walking along the street with his shadow stretching across the pavement and up a wall behind him. Only the man and his shadow had changed places so that the shadow was walking upright, the man angled and stretched out behind it.

He asked Toby, ‘Is that yours?'

‘God no. That's Rizzo's. He's a genius whereas my only talent, he assures me, is for being completely devoid of talent.'

The count called Rizzo went on searching, ignoring us. Toby stood looking at us, willing to please but not bringing himself to ask what we wanted. In the end he picked up a Spanish guitar that had been lying on a table and sat himself down cautiously beside Maria. The guitar seemed to comfort him. He plucked a chord or two, inexpertly, and risked a question.

‘Well, how's Verona?'

I wished I were anywhere but there. I thought it quite likely that one of these men had been Verona's lover. He didn't deserve to hear she was dead like this, in the ruins of a party with people around him. The question was, which one? Gentle, reassuring Toby seemed the more likely bet, but there was no telling for certain.

I asked Toby, ‘You haven't seen her, then?'

‘No. Is she all right?'

Toby, through his hangover, was starting to sense something was wrong. From across the room, Rizzo yelled, ‘Throw them out, Cur! Throw them out!'

‘Rizzo, that's hardly hospitable.'

‘Beware the family. Beware the family.'

Rizzo was glaring at us but there was something stagey about his anger. He was too self-absorbed to pick up the atmosphere as Toby had.

Toby explained, like a man who'd had to do it before, ‘Rizzo's an anarchist. We all are.'

I'd met angora rabbits that struck me as being more anarchistic than Toby. It was no more than typical student posing, but it wasn't helping. I asked Rizzo, ignoring the glare, ‘Why should you beware of Verona's family?'

He looked at me in silence, then turned away. Again, Toby explained for him.

‘He thinks her family will make her go back home and get married.'

I asked Rizzo's back, ‘You're against that?'

‘We're against marriage, possessing people and so forth.'

That was Toby again, clearly unhappy. He plucked a few more tentative sounds out of the guitar, single notes this time. Beside him, Maria stretched and yawned. Bill caught my eye, questioning. I still couldn't make up my mind, so there was no choice but to tell the whole roomful of them.

‘I'm sorry, but I've got some very bad news for you. Verona was found dead on Thursday.'

For a few seconds, the guitar notes went on, Toby's fingers working while his mind tried to catch up. In those seconds Rizzo turned slowly, eyes wide. His face had been pale before, now it was grey. He looked like the shadow-man in his picture. Maria asked in Spanish what was up. Nobody answered her. Toby asked: ‘How?' He was shaking so much he could hardly get the word out.

I said, ‘She was hanging in a boathouse.'

‘H … hanging? You mean she k … k…?'

‘There'll have to be an inquest, of course, but it does look as if she might have committed suicide.'

Toby screamed, a high little scream like a child's. He stood up, unsteady on his feet. His right hand still clutched the guitar. He looked as if he was going to be sick and I expected him to rush for the door. Instead he hurled himself across the room at Rizzo.

‘It's your fault. You made her go away. It's your fault.'

I don't know if Rizzo's failure to defend himself was due to arrogance or surprise. Before we could do anything Toby lifted the guitar in the air like a man doing a serve at tennis and brought it down with a splintering crash on Rizzo's head. Then they were both on the floor, Rizzo with the remains of the guitar round his head, Toby apparently trying to strangle him, not very effectively. Between us, Bill and I got them apart. Rizzo simply stood up, picked bits of wood off himself and walked out of the room without a word. Toby leaned against Bill, crying unashamedly, tears running down his beard. ‘I loved her. I loved her.'

*   *   *

With the help of Maria, who seemed to have woken up at last, we got Toby upstairs to bed. It was a sparsely furnished cubicle on the top floor, like a boarding school bedroom. The only thing by way of decoration was a charcoal sketch of a girl on a bed, barefoot, smoking a cigarette. I saw Bill looking at it and mouthed, ‘Verona.'

It was the sketch Rizzo had been doing when I was there. The paper had been crumpled and carefully smoothed out – probably rejected by the artist and retrieved by Toby. When we'd got him quiet, Bill and I left him in the care of Maria and went out onto the landing.

‘So what now? Do we still want to collect her things?'

I was about to say no, we'd leave it, when a door across the landing opened and a girl stuck her head out, looking annoyed.

‘What's going on now? Are they fighting again?'

I said Toby had had some bad news.

‘Oh God, there's always something in this house.'

‘Have you been here long?'

‘Three weeks, and it's a lifetime too long already. I'm moving out tomorrow.'