War Damage (22 page)

He smiled at the way she'd put it: ‘one's supposed to', as though it were a matter of the done thing, good manners, when actually it wasn't a case of ‘supposed': it was the law. But all he said was: ‘That's very understandable.'

She paused. ‘Only he isn't dead. He's come back.' She looked at him, smiling at her own stupidity, and a wave of protectiveness swept through him. ‘So my current marriage isn't valid, is it.' When she flushed she was lovelier than ever.

‘He's come back – you mean he's here, in London?'

She nodded, and bit her lip, like a little girl caught doing something wrong.

‘And he wants to resume the relationship – is that it?'

‘Oh no, that's not it at all. But I don't know what to do. You see, he's blackmailing me – well, not exactly, but that's what it amounts to.'

‘You've given him money?'

She nodded.

‘It's the same as with your friend. You should have gone to the police.'

She laughed then. ‘Well, this is what I'm doing now, isn't it, here with you. At first I thought he'd just go away. He kept saying he was going back to Ireland. But now he's behaving more and more strangely.'

‘In what way?'

‘At first I was sorry for him. But quite soon he began to frighten me. He hasn't exactly threatened me or anything, not in so many words, but there's something more and more disturbing about him.'

‘Have you told your husband?' he asked, knowing perfectly well what the answer would be.

‘Oh no!' She looked horrified. ‘I couldn't possibly do that.'

‘I think you may have to. You should report this formally to the police, that you're being blackmailed. And you should consult a lawyer. And you must tell your husband too. Surely he'll stand by you, won't he?'

‘I don't want to tell anyone. I don't want anyone to know. My husband – Neville – he's such a stickler for convention, he'd be – I don't know what he'd say. He'd be absolutely beside himself. Horrified. It would be such a scandal.'

He watched her. ‘You set great store by your marriage,' he said casually, dreading her answer.

‘Neville's been very good to me. I'd be letting him down so badly.'

He extracted a grain of comfort from her reply – it suggested gratitude, yes, but something less than passionate commitment.

He began to think the unthinkable – but of course to marry a divorced woman, or, worse, a bigamous one, would do him no good in the Force.

‘I understand,' he said. But he wasn't sure he did. He hadn't yet taken it in. He tried to think straight. ‘It must have been a great shock – him turning up like that.' It sounded stupid, out loud. Of course it had been a shock! ‘Look – whatever the legal situation, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, he's no right to threaten you. I'll – I'll try to find out how you'd stand, legally speaking. Or – would you like me to speak to him directly? Frighten him off – would that work, do you think?'

‘I don't know.' Regine looked at him. She shook her head. ‘I don't think so. I'll – let's see what happens. In any case I'm not going on the Heath any more, for the time being. I don't think he'll come to the house.'

Murray wondered why she was so sure of that, but he didn't want to frighten her. He watched her surreptitiously, from behind the smoke from his cigarette. She was looking dreamily away from him. There was a small dance floor in front of the band. A young man moved his partner slickly round to the thin strains of the string trio and Regine was watching the couple. He wondered what she was thinking about: about her husband, perhaps, come back from the dead; or perhaps she was thinking of Buckingham. Her friendship with the queer was incomprehensible. Perhaps, and this brought a pang of jealousy, she'd been hopelessly in love with the dead man. And yet in spite of his doubting thoughts he experienced a curious, light-headed feeling, almost a sense of euphoria. He watched her face: the eyes like green grapes, the red lips, the radiant skin. She felt his gaze and turned to smile at him. Her long fingers with the red nails and green ring twisted her amber necklace. Unexpectedly she stood up. Startled, he was scrambling to his feet as well. ‘Must you leave? I—'

She interrupted him. ‘Let's dance.'

‘I'm not much of a dancer, I'm afraid.'

‘Oh, I'm sure that's too modest. I haven't danced for ages. My husband isn't a dancing man. Come on.' She moved in the direction of the floor and of course he followed her.

twenty-two

R
EGINE HAD HOPED
Paul Murray might have reassured her on the subject of bigamy. She'd hoped he'd say that a few months, even a year, wouldn't be taken seriously by the courts, if you were 99 per cent certain your first husband was dead. But Paul Murray had looked rather grim. It was sweet of him to have offered to act more or less as her bodyguard, but that wouldn't solve anything.

In an attempt to avoid Eugene she no longer walked on the Heath, but as a result she dreaded a knock on the door, looked up and down the road each time she left the house, in case Eugene was lurking nearby. If she didn't do something soon, he would come to the house eventually, of that she was sure.

If Neville found out about Eugene he'd turn her out of the house. She had to be prepared. She had no money of her own. She had to somehow try to become more independent.

She invited the Wentworths for supper. After they'd eaten, Neville and Alan retreated to the library, leaving the women to gossip on their own.

‘The hare was lovely,' said Dinah. They'd all praised the hare; it had been a great success. ‘Where did you get it?'

‘Mr Graves has rather a soft spot for me,' said Regine, as if it were inexplicable, when in fact she flattered him outrageously, so that every time she walked into the shop he beamed with pleasure and grew six inches in height. ‘He sometimes saves little things for me. He told me a friend of his caught the hare on the Heath, but I don't believe
that
. I've never seen a hare on the Heath, have you? How lovely it would be if there were! Cato would love chasing them! Not that he ever catches anything. He can't even catch a mouse, let alone a squirrel.'

But Regine didn't want to talk about rationing and the high street butcher, or Cato's shortcomings as a mouser. There was Cynthia's situation to consider, and, obliquely, her own.

‘There's been a new development – Appleton's being blackmailed.'

‘
Blackmailed
! Do the police know?'

‘Appleton refused to go to the police. I told the sergeant on Freddie's case, but he wasn't very helpful.'

‘You do mean blackmailed about Cynthia?'

‘Yes. They went away together,' she said. ‘Cynthia thinks someone at the hotel must have recognised him, but why wait until now? And I keep thinking – you see, I was the only person who knew about the affair, Cynthia said I wasn't to tell anyone, not a soul, but then somehow I did tell Freddie—'

‘You
can't
mean
he
would have blackmailed anyone – anyway he couldn't because he's dead.'

‘No, of course not.' Regine remembered the afternoon Cynthia had confided in her that she was in love with Ernie Appleton – it was months ago, last April, May … a cold day, she'd had to light a fire and they'd sat there and talked and talked. Later, after Cynthia had left, Freddie had arrived and Regine and Freddie had gossiped until Neville came home and the conversation had turned to museum politics and the awful philistines who were running the country. ‘I
swore
him to secrecy, but I'm just afraid he might have told someone else.'

‘But who?'

‘I don't know. But Freddie used to take photographs of his friends and Neville said some of them were rather risqué. Actually he photographed me in a sort of glamour pose, but that was just a bit of fun, it wasn't indecent, just me in a corset and suspenders, stockings, one leg on a chair. Neville loved it. But Neville says some of the photos of his men friends were a bit more than that.'

‘I thought all that sort of thing only went on in Soho.'

‘Oh, it wasn't for money. But those photos are missing. Someone has them, and so perhaps the same person …'

Dinah said: ‘Does that mean someone Freddie knew? Someone you know – or we know?'

It was an unpleasant thought. ‘The police don't seem to have considered blackmail.'

‘Alan says queers often get blackmailed and they can't go to the police because it's against the law.'

Their conversation moved by means of an unspoken connection – the only half-acknowledged, darkly secret homosexual current – to Dinah's life at the Courtauld. Her enthusiasm was so obvious that Regine felt envious.

‘What happens when you have children?'

‘I don't see why married women shouldn't work. After all, it was women who kept everything going during the war,' said Dinah defiantly. Perhaps there'd been arguments with Alan. Regine's own unspoken agreement with Neville was that, children or no children, her translations should be only a rather ladylike, amateurish occupation, but that would have to change. She had an appointment with Edith Blake at Crispin Drownes tomorrow. She'd talk to her about it. Edith Blake was said to be an old-fashioned feminist. It might be fashionable to say women were only too pleased to be back in the home now the war was over, but Edith had decidedly different views, and wasn't afraid of being jeered at as a frumpy spinster and worse.

The men joined them again. ‘We've been talking about the Courtauld,' said Regine.

Alan's handsome face flushed. ‘Oh, Dinah talks about nothing else these days.'

‘I'm jealous. I'm thinking of becoming a career woman too.'

‘Oh, but it suits you down to the ground, being a lady of leisure, a wonderful salon hostess.'

‘Alan! She's
not
a lady of leisure,' cried Dinah. ‘And you know, since the war, you men can't keep us in purdah any longer.'

He laughed. ‘More's the pity. Though actually, if you're serious, Reggie, there might be something at the Beeb I suppose. Why don't we meet for lunch? We can talk about it in more detail then. When are you next in town?'

‘Tomorrow as it happens. I have an appointment at my publishers.'

‘You can meet me for lunch then.'

When they were alone, Neville turned on her, a glint in his eye. ‘I hope you're not thinking seriously of getting a job. I think Dinah's having a bad influence on you. If Alan's got any sense he'll get her pregnant. That'll put a stop to all that nonsense about careers. Only then it'll give him more time for adultery I suppose. You were flirting with him again, weren't you! I don't believe all that talk about lunch, let alone a job. He's not interested in finding you work. A hotel room somewhere, that's what Alan has in mind for you, isn't it? I thought the spanking I gave you last time would have taught you a lesson. But I think you're going to need another good thrashing.'

But suddenly the accumulation of fear and anxiety, all her confused emotions and everything since Freddie had died, fused into a single gesture of revolt. She jerked herself away from him. ‘Oh, for God's sake
stop it
,' she cried. ‘Just leave me alone.'

She wasn't going to play his games any more.

* * * * *

The offices of Crispin Drownes, publishers, spread through the whole of a Georgian terraced house off Bloomsbury Square. A repressive receptionist whose outdated black pompadour towered above her marble forehead presided behind a battered mahogany counter. She directed Regine upwards to Edith Blake's sanctum and as Regine climbed the staircase, with its dangerously tattered carpet waiting to trip you up, what struck her was the dust. The narrow stairs were lined with shelves filled with slowly disintegrating books that seemed not to have been touched for decades. The terrace had escaped bombs, but not the fallout from nearby explosions. The chalky smell from the miasma of plaster grime still lingered three years later, mingled with two centuries of London soot and human detritus, from men, mostly men in Victorian black, and a few women in bombazine dresses and bonnets like bats, treading the stairs year after year, leaving flakes of human skin, human hair, brushing the walls with their greasy clothes, endless, ant-heap human activity all in the pursuit of the production of thousands and thousands of forgotten books.

Edith Blake was waiting for her on the landing, dauntingly tall, with thick grey hair swept back in waves from her face, like an Eton crop that surprisingly turned into a bun at the back. She wore a tweed suit, its belted Norfolk jacket incongruous with the longish pleated skirt, whose length bore no relation to the New Look, the whole ensemble left over, surely, from a grouse-shooting expedition in the thirties.

As Regine approached her, ready to take the outstretched hand, she felt more as though the appropriate move would be genuflection. A sense of awe, almost dread, echoed her long ago emotions in the presence of the Mother Superior. She had no idea how full of confidence she appeared to the older woman.

Edith Blake's office was a wood-panelled nineteenth-century sanctum, one corner consecrated to the chair that had belonged to the firm's most famous Victorian author. ‘Mr Drownes senior is away today,' explained Edith, but everyone knew that she was the power behind the throne. Paid a pittance by the family firm, hers nevertheless was the achievement of the reputation that was rebuilding since the war.

‘So – how are the Dark Ages progressing?'

‘Slowly, I'm afraid – well, about another seventy pages to go.' There would be no vulgar mention of deadlines here, she knew, but the book weighed on her.

‘Well done – it certainly is long.'

‘I'll try to finish it by the end of the month; definitely before Christmas.' She was trying to think of a suitable approach to the topic of proper employment. No tactful way of begging for a job had occurred to her on the bus journey into town, but as it turned out she need not have worried.

‘That wasn't what I wanted to talk to you about.' Edith Blake wore a signet ring on the little finger of her right hand and turned it as she spoke. Regine, trying to peer unobtrusively, thought it was engraved with a family crest. ‘We need to expand and invigorate our foreign list. Now that things are beginning to get back to normal, the war memoirs and the personal accounts of fighting with the Yugoslav partisans and so on need to be augmented by some serious foreign literature. News is beginning to trickle out of new French philosophers: the Existentialist movement, I don't know if you've heard of it?'

‘Of course. Jean Paul Sartre, Camus …'

‘Exactly. But I'm not suggesting more translations for you. We need someone here to develop the whole area of continental literature, but that's not really it either. We need someone to expand the publicity side and we think you, with your contacts and your …' Edith hesitated, then continued, ‘You're so good at getting on with people. You'd be our public face. Things will be different soon. It will be a different world. We won't be able just to rely on our readers coming to us. We'll need to promote ourselves. It will be an age of advertisement.'

Regine recognised this as unexpectedly forward-looking of Edith, and it was a wonderful idea. She mentioned one or two ideas about how it could be done.

‘I was sure you're just the person we're looking for, Mrs Milner.'

Regine had never imagined it would be this easy. She hardly listened as Edith Blake ran through the details. The salary wasn't enormous, but it would do for now.

‘It's midday,' said Edith. ‘Time for a sherry, I think.' She produced a bottle and three glasses from a cupboard, along with a battered tin of dusty biscuits. ‘I'll just call William in to share the good news.'

‘Delighted to have you with us, Mrs Milner.' William Drownes shook her hand and blushed slightly. He was untidy and carelessly dressed, the grey pullover he wore under his tweed jacket was unravelling at the edge, his corduroy trousers were crumpled and going bald at the knee.

A toast was drunk, then Edith said: ‘We thought you might care to join us for lunch at Rules.'

Regine silently cursed, but she'd agreed to have lunch with Alan Wentworth and couldn't back out now.

When she arrived at the Soho restaurant, Alan was already seated at a table at the back.

‘I've got a new job! With Crispin Drownes.' She'd known at once she had to grab the chance with both hands. Of course, she should have said: I must discuss it with my husband. But Neville would be displeased, so it would be better to present him with a fait accompli.

‘Well – we must drink to your new publishing career.' There was already an opened bottle of wine on the table. He poured her a glass. ‘There's my excuse for inviting you to lunch gone down the drain. Though if you change your mind – foreign broadcasts might be more exciting than the staid world of publishing.'

As they scanned the menu Alan said: ‘Any news about Buckingham's murder?'

‘News?'

‘Are the police nearer to catching anyone? The whole thing seems to have stalled.'

‘Don't let's talk about it, Alan. It's too upsetting. Let's talk about something cheerful.'

Over the spaghetti, Alan heaped praise on her talents as a hostess, dwelt on her charm, her beauty, so that, at first flattered, Regine began to fear the inevitable, unwelcome conclusion. Sure enough: ‘You really are the most alluring woman. I'd love to take you to bed.'