Bones of the Buried (34 page)

‘What was he like in Africa?’

‘Ben? Oh, can’t you guess? It was Tarzan stuff. Ben waving his gun in the air and killing anything which came into his sights. It just had to be bigger and stripier and have sharper
teeth than anyone else’s.’

‘But you’re a crack shot, Hester. Ben told me. Did you kill a lion?’

‘Ben told you that? Bullshit. Bullshit Belasco.’

‘He said he knew all about Makepeace Hoden being killed. In fact he said he wrote a story about it.’

‘Yeah, he did. One of his best. I think I’ve got a copy of it. It came out in
Transatlantic Review
. I’ll give it you. It’s about a man who committed a great
sin.’

‘A great sin?’

‘Yep, but we never get to know what it is. It’s an odd thing but, as I’ve said, Ben’s full of shit except when he gets a pen in his hand. It’s as if his pen
has
to tell the truth even though his tongue doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

‘But you didn’t meet Hoden, I mean before he was killed?’

‘Not before or after. Why, do you think I killed him?’

‘No, of course not,’ Verity said hurriedly.

‘But you do,’ Hester teased. ‘I
might
have killed him. He was a bastard too, by all accounts.’

‘Did he commit some terrible sin, do you think?’

‘Maybe. You’ll have to ask Ben next time you’re in bed together. I suppose you do have time for conversation?’

Later, for want of something better to do, Verity accompanied her friend to the Institute to watch her rehearsing
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. At the back of her mind, she wondered
if she might get a chance to ask Maurice Tate a few leading questions.

The British Institute was on Calle Alcalá Galiano. It had once been a school and still had a smell of chalk and disinfectant about it. In what had been the gymnasium
there was now a theatre – a primitive stage, a few lights and simple oil-cloth curtains. Verity had heard Hester’s lines for her until she knew them as well as her friend. As the French
Princess, Hester was marvellously haughty with Ferdinand, King of Navarre – one of the lusty young men who had forsworn love for three years. He was played by one of the few Spaniards in the
cast. José was one of Maurice’s protégés: very good-looking, muscular, prone to taking off his shirt at the slightest excuse, with a six o’clock shadow whatever
time of day it was. Verity suspected that Hester and José might be having an affair but, if they were, they were discreet about it and she had never seen the boy in the apartment.

At first, Verity found the play hard to follow and wondered what the Spanish in the audience would make of it. It seemed to abound in word play; Elizabethan puns, inexplicable jokes which must
have been highly topical when they were penned, displaying what Maurice called Shakespeare’s drunken delight in the sound of words. He explained Shakespeare was exhibiting his skill with
‘wit’ as a fencer might dazzle onlookers with his foil. But this wit, which had once been the height of fashion, had over time become almost unintelligible. On the other hand, the
preening and flirting in which the characters indulged was very Spanish. Verity had watched young men strolling along the Gran Vía flaunting their sexuality in just this way. And the sense
of honour, which now seemed antiquated to a young British girl, made perfect sense to the Spanish.

Verity sat at the back of the room and prepared to be bored but, in fact, she was soon engrossed in what was happening on stage. She was impressed by Tate’s direction. He had thrown off
the feeble air of a provincial aesthete and assumed control of what could easily have been chaos. He not only knew the play through and through but also seemed to know exactly what it was about and
how it should be played. He was lucid and patient but quite ruthless in getting what he wanted. It was a new Maurice, as far as Verity was concerned, and she found herself thinking that this was a
man who could commit murder if it were essential to his gaining a particular end.

She was much taken with the character of the braggart Armado – the so-called ‘fantastical Spaniard’ – an absurd, clownish figure made more appealing by Shakespeare
softening his absurdity with a vein of melancholy. She could not decide whether the Spanish in the audience would be offended or whether they would see in Armado a prefiguring of Cervantes’
Don Quixote. Armado – ‘his humour lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous . . .’
– was most amusingly played by, of all people, Maurice’s friend Agustín, the pianist at Chicote’s. Verity thought he was so good that he should take up acting
professionally.

Armado and some of the other clownish characters were performing a play for the ‘great ones’ who were mocking their efforts unmercifully. Verity was laughing at their antics when
suddenly she was arrested by some lines of Armado’s in which he upbraided his betters for jeering at his efforts to portray the Greek warrior, Hector. If they mock him, he says, they mock
Hector and ‘the sweet warman is dead and rotten’.

‘
Diga me
,
Maurizio
,’ said Agustín, coming out of character, ‘what does it mean when I say, “beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed he was
a man”?’

‘It’s another way of saying, speak well of the dead and respect the chap because he was once a living, breathing man like you and me,’ Maurice explained.

It made Verity think. Three men were dead: Hoden, Tilney and Thayer. They had all in some way offended someone. And there was a dead child: dead and rotten these eighteen years.

‘Maurice,’ said Verity, during the break for ‘tea and recriminations’, as Hester termed it, ‘you were wonderful. I had no idea you would be such a good director.
I’m impressed.’

Maurice blushed with pleasure and immediately reverted to being the effete ‘man of letters’ which so irritated her.

‘I’m glad you like it, my dear. José, now – isn’t he gorgeous?’

‘He’s a very good actor.’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’ Maurice said with feeling.

‘And Agustín, he’s so good as Armado. Like Don Quixote, I thought.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, seeming surprised at her perspicacity.

‘I was struck by the phrase he asked you about.’

‘Which one?’

‘ “The bones are buried”, that bit. I was thinking about Tilney.’

‘For goodness’ sake why, child? You think he was a “sweet warman”?’

‘Not quite but . . .’

‘He was a piece of garbage – nothing more,’ Maurice said with cold contempt. ‘It was the best thing that could have happened – him being shot like a mad
dog.’

The vehemence of his words rendered Verity speechless and Maurice, seeing her expression, quickly corrected himself. ‘I don’t know why I said that, my dear, forgive me. The play . .
. I was thinking of the play, but he was a nasty piece of work.’

‘Because of his politics?’

‘Oh no, what do I care about his politics? He could have believed in . . . in Hector for all I cared. But he was – forgive me, dear, but I must say it – a complete and utter
bastard. He tried to blackmail me once.’

‘Blackmail?’

‘Yes, he said if I didn’t do . . . some dirty political thing for him, he would tell everyone I was queer.’

‘Queer? Homosexual? But that’s ridiculous. You’re married . . . with a daughter.’

Maurice looked at her oddly and seemed about to say something, but changed his mind at the last moment.

‘So what did you do?’ Verity prompted.

‘I told him to go to hell, of course. I said the Spanish – in spite of all the Catholic stuff – were a surprisingly broadminded lot and had a different sense of honour to him.
In fact, I think I said – I certainly meant to – that he had no idea what the word “honour” meant.’

‘Gosh! Was that the end of it?’

‘No, the pool of vomit – excuse my French, dear – said he would tell the people back home and ruin my career, blast him.’

‘And did he?’

‘No, he died. Or, at least, we thought he had died. But of course he wasn’t dead – not then anyway.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘I would like to have done,’ Maurice said with evident sincerity, ‘but, as it happened, I didn’t – either time.’

‘You went back to England a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you? Not bad news, I hope?’

‘As a matter of fact my mother was ill. They thought she might die.’

‘But she was all right?’

‘She pulled through – unfortunately.’

‘Unfortunately?’

‘She’s not been in her right mind for years. I hoped she might fade away peacefully.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘She’s a Catholic and she’s in a Catholic home. Maggie, my daughter, has to live with her aunt and I’m afraid she doesn’t like it. I told you my wife died when
Maggie was only a baby. The people who look after my mother are very good but, as Catholics, they are morally bound to keep someone alive – bring them back from the dead – when it might
be more merciful . . . She had pneumonia during the winter . . . She should have passed away but . . . I’m . . .’

Verity saw that he was in tears and she upbraided herself for being callous. She put a hand on his arm and squeezed it gently. ‘Please forgive me, Maurice. I didn’t mean to upset
you.’

‘Oh, it’s not your fault,’ he said, pulling out a grubby handkerchief and mopping his eyes. ‘My mother’s the only woman I’ve ever truly loved and I hate
myself for wanting her to die.’

‘Of course you don’t. You just want her to be at peace.’

Maurice looked at her gratefully and smiled wanly.

When, at half-past seven, they were strolling back to the apartment in the warm, sweet-smelling air of early summer, Verity, emboldened by the semi-darkness and by Hester’s unshockability
as far as sex was concerned, said, ‘You seem to get on very well with José. He’s so beautiful I wondered if you were . . . having an affair.’

To Verity’s puzzlement, her friend broke into peals of laughter that made others strolling along the Gran Vía look at her and smile in sympathy.

‘My dear, sweet, innocent cherub,’ she said when she had at last stopped laughing, ‘José is Maurice’s new boyfriend. Surely you noticed the way the two of them
were looking at each other?’

‘Boyfriend . . .? Then is he really . . .? Oh God, what a fool I am. But I thought his special friend was Agustín . . .’

‘Well, of course! Goodness, you are unobservant. Didn’t you pick up “the atmosphere”? I quite thought Agustín would hit Maurice, or at least walk out, but he so
loves being in the play . . .’

Verity felt very foolish. As a journalist, being called unobservant was worse than being biased or corrupt. It meant she was no good at her job and that was the one thing she clung on to –
that she was a good journalist. Angry with herself, she became angry at Hester.

‘Oh no, that’s disgusting! José’s a real man. I’m sure you’re quite wrong.’

‘Wrong, am I?’ said Hester indignantly. ‘Well, I have seen them in bed together.’

‘You haven’t!’

‘I have. I went to Maurice’s apartment because he said he wanted to give me some notes on my part. He had obviously forgotten I was coming because, when he opened the door, he was in
nothing but a silk dressing-gown and behind him, through the bedroom door which was open, I could see José, naked as a baby sprawled across the bed.’

In the darkness, Verity coloured. She decided to change the subject: ‘Maurice says Tilney was trying to blackmail him. Do you think that’s possible?’

‘Quite possible,’ said Hester firmly. ‘That man . . . there was something reptilian about him. I hated him.’

‘But Rosalía liked him – loved him – and she’s not a fool.’

‘Maybe. Maybe he was kind to her but he was a cold fish – a bully and a coward. I don’t like saying it, but he deserved to die. I have a feeling Rosalía, bless her, may
be a bit of a masochist.’

‘But no one likes being hurt.’

‘Yes, they do. Some people like to be physically hurt. Haven’t you ever heard that some men go to prostitutes to be beaten with birch rods?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Verity, horrified. ‘That’s . . . that’s horrible.’

‘It’s so common in your country, the French call it the English disease.’

Verity was, for once, speechless. It seemed she knew nothing about sex after all. She shook her head. She saw herself as broadminded – even immoral. After all, she was the mistress of a
married man. It made her feel very cosmopolitan. Edward would probably call her a scarlet woman. She wondered why she should think of Edward at that particular moment. It wasn’t as though she
cared how he might view her behaviour. He wasn’t her conscience.

‘Some women like to be tortured mentally, or psychologically,’ Hester was saying. ‘But perhaps the worm turned.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, to be truthful, I have always wondered if Rosalía didn’t murder Tilney. I wouldn’t blame her if she had.’

Verity thought about this. ‘No, I don’t believe she’s capable of murder and I do believe she loved Tilney. I can’t forget her wailing when we discovered his body. In
fact, tomorrow I’m going up to the cave with Rosalía to hunt for clues.’

‘But why? What could be there now after all this time?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing probably, but I was so shocked when we found the body I didn’t have a chance to look around properly.’

‘I think you’re mad, cherub, but don’t let me stop you. But keep a weather ear open. The stab in the back . . .’

‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Hetty. Anyway, it’s weather
eye
.’

‘I’m absurd, am I?’ Hester said, pretending to take umbrage. ‘I guess you know best, but don’t blame me if you get pushed off a cliff. I’m going to change and
have a wash – then shall we go down to Chicote’s?’

They all sat round the table laughing, telling stories, happy. Ben Belasco was drinking hard. When he was working well, he almost never drank but, when he had finished a story
or even a piece of journalism, he would celebrate by what he called ‘bingeing’. He had finished a story that afternoon while Verity was watching
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and was in cracking form. He told stories about his childhood in Colorado: how he had been running with a stick in his mouth and had fallen and gouged out his tonsils, how at high school he had
taken the part of the playwright Sheridan in a play called
Beau Brummel
and had felt ‘damn queer’, how he had become a keen boxer and after being knocked out had woken to find a
beautiful girl massaging his face with a wet sponge. ‘Gee, was I a humdinger in those days,’ he remembered fondly. And all the time he told stories, he was stroking Verity – her
neck, her leg, her thigh – and she knew there would be energetic love-making later that night. It was as if the adrenalin he needed to finish a story then had to be washed out in sex.