A Natural Curiosity (29 page)

Publicity. Press. The new demons of democracy.

The week before, Liz had been seated at a gala dinner of the RIBA at the Goldsmiths’ Hall next to a Law Lord who had been involved in the earlier stages of P. Whitmore’s trial. She had endured his strong and ill-informed views on the Corbusier exhibition and the new Lloyd’s building and the new Tate extension (none of which he had visited), and then had edged him on to P. Whitmore. Here, he had been illuminating. He had of course, he said, been of the opinion that Whitmore was as mad as a meat-axe (he glared at Liz as he said this, as though assuming she would dissent), and that he should not stand trial for murder, but the judge in the case had taken another view. Why? Liz had demurely inquired. ‘Because,’ said the red but shrivelled little walnut of a man, ‘because he wanted his fortnight of glory. The limelight. The press. Oh yes, he wanted his name in the papers, he wanted the limelight.’

He spoke as one who understood this craving. A small old man who knew nothing about Corbusier, but who could distinguish the sane from the criminally insane, because that was his job. And who understood, moreover, the human frailties of his colleagues. The wigs and robes and medals and the ribbons and silver buckles. The headlines. Corruption and vanity. And people call
women
vain, reflected Liz, as she listened to the old lord. He did not ask her a single question throughout the meal. Liz did not mind, much: she was used to banal, self-obsessed monologues. She was a professional listener. Occasionally, as she listened, it had crossed her mind to interrupt him by claiming acquaintance with the infamous Whitmore, but she held her peace and let him talk.

Wigs and buckles. Leaders in the press. And thus it was that Paul Whitmore was incarcerated in Porston Prison, complaining about his vegetarian meals, rather than complaining about similar meals in Broadmoor or Rampton. It probably didn’t make much difference where he was. To him. Though the decision had cost the state some money, as the old walnut knew.

The limelight. A curious word. Tidying up her letters, drifting towards lunch, she paused to look it up in her
Pocket Oxford
: ‘Intense white light obtained by heating cylinder of lime in oxyhydrogen flame; (fig.) full glare of publicity.’ Was that what Hilda Stark bathed in daily? Was that what P. W. had wanted? And had got? She looked up quicklime. ‘Unslaked lime.’ No reference to Oscar Wilde or Reading Gaol.

She put the dictionary back on the shelf and stood for a moment irresolute. Into the silence, the telephone rang. Her secretary Vera spoke: there was a Mr Robert Holland on the line, wanting to speak to Liz about her sister, would she take the call? Liz found her mouth had gone dry. ‘Yes,’ she said. She had a very clearly transmitted picture of Shirley dead, lying in a shallow white outcast’s grave.

Fanny Kettle was planning the finer details of her party. She was happy doing this, and her son Tony was happy for her. They sat together at the kitchen-table, surrounded by lists. He liked to see her innocently busy.

‘I make it fifty-two acceptances, twelve refusals, and twenty who haven’t replied,’ said Tony.

‘Well, I asked the caterers to do seventy-five, so I guess that’s just about right,’ said Fanny.

‘Did we ever hear from the Duke?’ asked Fanny, who knew quite well that we had, but who liked to dwell on such matters.

Tony searched through the pile and found the handsome crested papers. ‘A very polite apology from the Duke, he’s at a dinner in Manchester, he much regrets. Regrets too from the Marquis of Stocklinch. But Lady Joanna Hestercombe is coming or so she says.’

‘Odd, that,’ said Fanny. ‘I wonder why?’

Tony stared at her thick grey headed missive, but it offered no clue. Lady Joanna Hestercombe, Aspin Court Farm, Stocklinch, it said. Telephone Stocklinch 329.

‘I dunno,’ said Tony. ‘Maybe she likes parties?’

‘I wouldn’t have
thought
so, from the look of her. Horses are more her thing, I’m told. I wonder if we ought to order some more canapes?’

They checked numbers, the names of delicacies, poring over the glossy brochure of the smart catering firm recommended by one of Ian’s television chaps. ‘The bacon rolls stuffed with chicken livers sound good,’ said Tony, hungrily, cutting himself another hunk of cheddar from the glistening ochre deeply fissured slab at his elbow, ‘and the crab claws in garlic dip. Yummy.’

‘What
I’m
planning,’ said Fanny, ‘is a really spectacular drink. It would be fun to start people off with a really exciting ‘
coloured
drink. What do you think, Tony darling?’

He nodded, munching. He was wondering whether Alice Enderby, daughter of Janice and Edward Enderby, would come to the party with her parents. Should he make a point of making sure she was invited, or would Fanny tease him if he did?

‘A vodka base, perhaps,’ mused Fanny. ‘With a little Angostura? Or grenadine? A pale-pink drink would be rather smart, don’t you think? And we could give it a special name. Something exotic, something bewildering. Come on, think of something for me, Tony. Something wild and Celtic. Something primitive and primeval. Come on, you know all that archaeological stuff. Who was the Celtic goddess of parties?’

‘I don’t know if they had one,’ said Tony, amused despite himself by his mother’s frivolous misapplications of his father’s mysteries: Fanny was so outrageous, what could one do but laugh and admire? ‘There was a goddess of plenty,’ he proffered. ‘Would she do? Rosmerta, she was called.’

‘Rosmerta.’ Fanny tried out the name. ‘Rosmerta. Rosmerta. No, I don’t think she would do at all. Horrid word. A hurty smurty dirty word. But we’re on the right lines. Who else is there?’

Tony ran through what he could recall of the Celtic pantheon: there was a Brigit, the goddess of the Brigantes? Or Sulis Minerva, from Bath? These Fanny rejected as wholly unfestive. Tony couldn’t think of any more, so went off in search of Graham Webster’s
The British Celts and Their Gods under Rome
, and started thumbing through the index. Fanny didn’t like the sound of any of the Celtic deities. The great Queen Rigatona sounded too like a kind of pasta, she said, and horse goddess Epona sounded bony and snooty. The glossary wasn’t much help either. It listed only twenty-eight Celtic words, and none of them would do:
derna, deva, dubo, lem, leuca, maglis, matis
 . . . 

‘Stop, stop,’ cried Fanny, ‘
what
an ugly language, those won’t do at all. Look up in the index for anything beginning with
p
. It’s to be a pink drink, so something beginning with
p
would do.’

Patiently, Tony turned to the index. ‘Pagan, paleolithic,
Pales
, pantheon,’ he read. ‘Hmm, pagan’s not bad, Pagan Pink. Not bad.’

‘But read on,’ she urged him, ‘read on.’

‘Phallus,’ he read, obligingly. ‘Pharsalia.’

‘That’s it!’ she cried. ‘Pharsalian! Pharsalian Pink! Brilliant! I can just see it, a beautiful crystal bowl of Pharsalian Pink. A beautiful subtle misty pinky-bluey-smoky pink!’

Tony pointed out that Pharsalia didn’t, strictly, phonetically, begin with a
p
. (He did not point out that Fanny’s ideal drink colour strangely resembled that of methylated spirits.)

‘Never mind,’ said Fanny. ‘It sounds wonderful. Pharsalian Pink! It’s inspired. Clever boy. What does it mean?’

‘I think it’s the name of a poem,’ said Tony, vaguely. His attention had been distracted by the entries for phallus: unobtrusively, furtively turning the pages, he had lit upon an alarming but intriguing drawing of a phallus with wings and legs from a sherd in the Colchester Castle Museum, and another drawing of a very rude frieze in which a pursuing youth spilled his seed upon the ground before reaching his destined maiden. The maiden’s gesture in response to this copious premature ejaculation was ambiguous, but, either way, rude. He concealed the page from Fanny’s gaze. It was not suitable for Fanny’s eyes.

‘Pharsalian Pink,’ said Fanny. ‘Yes, that should get them all going, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. Yes. Of course. Yes. Thank you so much for ringing. Of course, yes, I understand. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.’

Liz put the phone down. She had said she understood, but she did not understand at all. She could not take it all in. She looked down at what she had written on her note-pad. Robert Holland. Institute of English Studies. 188, rue de Vaugirard. 62 bis, rue de Saussure, 15è. A couple of telephone numbers. Robert Holland. Who on earth was Robert Holland? And what was he doing, in Paris, with her sister Shirley? The whole thing was quite impossible, and the most impossible part of it all was that Robert had sounded so normal, so ordinary, so like the kind of person one might know anyway, so like the kind of chap one has known all one’s life. Liz felt dizzy. So Shirley wasn’t lying in a shallow grave, she was hiding in a love nest in Paris. How could this be?

‘What did she say?’ asked Shirley. Shirley was lying back on the uncomfortable striped chaise longue with her feet up on a little pillow, sipping an Alka-Seltzer. She had decided she would have to go home and face the music. She was still feeling very odd—better, mentally, but physically she was coming to pieces. Her stomach was upset, she had a strange stinging bloody vaginal discharge, and a painful boil on her left buttock. She had confided some of these problems to Robert, but not all. She was surprised by how little they worried her. She had no intention of going to see a French doctor. She would go home, instead, and see Dr Peckham. And she needed a hot bath. It was impossible to get a hot bath in Robert’s bathroom. She had failed to master the snake-like cantankerous system, and Robert admitted that it was temperamental. She was beginning to yearn for her own well-appointed suburban bathroom. And what about the handle of the downstairs cloakroom lavatory? She hadn’t got round to fixing it, had she? She had a dim idea that the handle of the door had killed Cliff. No, it was time she went home.

‘She said everybody had been very worried about you. Of course,’ said Robert.

Shirley smiled, irresponsibly.

‘I bet she wasn’t all
that
pleased to hear,’ she said. ‘I told you she wouldn’t care, one way or the other.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite true,’ said Robert, cautiously. ‘Of course she was relieved to hear you were alive. And well.’

‘I’m not well,’ said Shirley, shifting her bottom to ease the pressure on the boil. And she laughed.

‘So all you have to do,’ said Robert, ‘is to make your mind up about your car. Whether you want to pick it up on the way or not. Or whether you want to come all the way back with me, tomorrow.’

‘I suppose everybody will be very annoyed with me,’ said Shirley. ‘Whatever I do, they’ll be annoyed with me.
You’re
not annoyed with me, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Robert, and leant over and grasped her ankle reassuringly. He held her foot and stroked her toes. ‘Why ever should
I
be annoyed with you?’

They smile at one another, a smile of complicity, ease, understanding. They are companions in crime, they have managed to avoid expectation, recrimination, commitment. They live in the present, they avoid tension. For the moment, there seems to be no problem in going back to Northam and a hot bath. Let the police and the lawyers and the coroner and her children and her sister mutter and fret and bluster. Who cares? None of it is important. Shirley stretches, yawns. She is perpetually tired. It is a delightful sensation, this tiredness. Her physical discomforts are delightful. Her body swims in a bloody flux, and Robert Holland companionably caresses her stockinged toes.

Some hours after receiving the phone call from Robert Holland, Liz received another phone call from Esther Breuer in Bologna. Esther wished to report that two evenings ago she had seen Shirley Harper in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. At the time, she told Liz, she had thought this odd, but not very odd: she had now learned from Alix that Shirley had in theory disappeared, so perhaps Liz ought to know her whereabouts?

‘Thanks awfully, Esther,’ said Liz, ‘but in fact I did have a phone call at lunch time today. From the man she’s with. Saying she’s coming home tomorrow. What a very odd affair. You say you actually
saw
her? Did she see you?’

‘I don’t know. I sort of think we pretended not to see one another.

‘And in the Musée d’Orsay, you say? What on earth can she have been doing there? She’s never been to an art gallery in her life. Well, hardly ever. Has she turned into a completely new person? If I hadn’t had this phone call from this man, I’d have had to say that I thought you were mistaken. But a man is just as surprising as an art gallery. What did he look like?’

‘Quite nice, really,’ said Esther. ‘Sort of middle aged and pleasant. Yes, pleasant. You know. Not a rapist or a murderer. The kind of person one might ask to dinner. If one asked people to dinner—which I don’t.’

‘I say,’ said Liz, ‘do you think Cliff committed suicide because he found out about Shirley and this man?’

‘I didn’t even know Cliff had committed suicide until Alix told me this morning,’ said Esther.

‘Well, it’s not exactly headline news,’ said Liz. ‘How should you have known?’ And then, a little suspiciously, ‘And what
was
Alix phoning you about, anyway?’

‘Oh, nothing much, she wanted me to translate some Italian phrases in a letter of Beaver’s. And then we got chatting, and I told her she hadn’t been able to get me earlier because I’d been in Paris, and then I told her about the Musée and happened to mention I’d seen Shirley . . . ’

‘And what
did
you make of the Musée?’ asks Liz, temporarily distracted. Esther gives her impressions. They chatter on, moving from Moreau to Freud and the Oedipus complex and Vienna and whether or not Hoffmann is right to argue that Freud was wrong to revise his presentation of hysteria. They speak of Paul Whitmore, of Alix’s obsession, of Esther’s long-dead palm, of Paul Whitmore’s curious sympathy for this palm, of what palm trees symbolized, if anything, of Saqui Farooqui’s poem about a palm. ‘Oh Esther,’ says Liz, suddenly depressed, ‘I wish you hadn’t deserted us. With Alix up north and you in Italy, London’s not what it was. And Stephen’s still in Cambodia, and Charles is in Baldai, and all I have is my little tabby cat.’