Curtain Call (41 page)

Hurrying back across the garden, Tom tried to sort out his misgivings about what he had just seen. Of course anyone could make a telephone call, it would not have been noteworthy in ordinary circumstances. But these circumstances were not ordinary, he felt, not with a houseful of men dragged up and reckless with drink. There was something furtive in the man's behaviour that had unsettled him. Re-entering the house he went upstairs in search of Jimmy. Surely a portly old gent in an evening gown wouldn't be hard to spot . . . and indeed there he was, in his element, plumped on a small sofa with a couple of young men perched on either wing. His make-up had smudged around the eyes, otherwise he looked quite in command of himself.

‘Jim, may I have a word?'

Squinting through a cloud of cigar smoke, Jimmy patted the seat next to him companionably, but Tom demurred: this had to be
entre eux
. With a little sigh Jimmy heaved himself upright, cane in hand, and followed Tom into the music room. The noise there wouldn't suit a conversation either, so they found a smaller room at the front of the house, empty but for a smooching couple who ignored them. Jimmy, wheezing from the exertion, settled himself on a window seat and relit his cigar.

‘D'you hear what they were playing before?'

Tom nodded. ‘Hadn't heard it in a while.'

Jimmy tipped his head to one side, and sang:

From the sad sea waves back to bus'ness in the morning,

From the sad sea waves to his humble ‘five-a-week';

In a cookshop he goes dashing, who should bring his plate of hash in,

But the girl he had been mashin' by the sad sea waves.

‘You know I saw Vesta Tilley sing it – I must have told you. My God, the charm of the thing, Tom! Call it heresy but I'd take that over any aria at Covent Garden.' He blinked, and focused. ‘So, what's this about?'

‘Have you seen a couple of foppish types in straw boaters – sort of homage to Bosie?'

‘They have been noted. Why?'

‘I've just had a very odd encounter. One of them seemed to know a lot about you –'

‘Hmm, he's probably got a play he wants me to read.'

‘No, nothing like that. His interest was in your
after
-hours. Said you were known as Barrack Room Bertha.'

Jimmy sniffed. ‘Hardly original.'

‘He wanted a name – was ready to pay for it, too.'

‘I trust you didn't . . .'

‘Of course not! I'm just wondering if he's on to you – he might be a blackmailer. I mean, imagine a snapper catching you here, the photograph that would land on Lord Swaim's desk.'

Jimmy didn't care to entertain that idea. ‘How can you be sure?'

‘I can't. It's guesswork. But I did see him making a telephone call outside.' As he said this he went over to the window overlooking the road. A car, caught in the narrow cone of light from a street lamp, had stopped round the corner from the house. Then another car pulled up behind it, and cut its engine. They seemed to be waiting for something, perhaps to collect a guest. The door of the first car opened, and a man in uniform stepped out. But it wasn't a chauffeur's uniform –

‘Tom? What's wrong?'

Jimmy, still seated, had been watching him at the window. The twitch he had first noticed in Tom's shoulders had now passed through his frame, shaking it violently, as if poked by an electric rod. Was he drunk? He called to him again, but Tom gave no sign of having heard. Then he collapsed on the floor, his limbs jerking like a clockwork toy. His eyes had rolled up into his head. Jimmy looked around to appeal for help, but the smooching couple were gone. He stared aghast at Tom's face, off-white and in spasm – it looked like an epileptic seizure. There was a procedure to alleviating a victim, he knew, he'd done a first-aid course in the service . . . The danger was in swallowing the tongue. He had bent down, awkwardly, to loosen Tom's tie when a shout came from below.

‘Everyone out! The police!'

Jimmy went to the window, and saw what Tom had seen coming up the drive: a file of uniformed constables, and, at their side, the young man got up as Bosie.
Oh Jesus
. A raid! He dashed to the door and stopped, with a piteous backward glance at Tom on the carpet, then hurried off.
Save yourself, save yourself
, was his thought as he clattered down the staircase. The hall had become a scene of panicked flight, like the moment someone shouted ‘Fire' in a theatre. Men encumbered by their unfamiliar garb broke into a shuffle-run of comical inelegance, though far from comical to Jimmy, already gasping with the effort of haste. In the rush for the back exit a table toppled over and glasses hit the floor with an exuberant crash.

He bolted onto the terrace and saw Peter rising languidly from his chair, as if this chaotic exodus were a regular farce.

‘Peter, thank God! Tom's upstairs having a – a fit! I didn't know what to do.' Though even in his panic he knew what he shouldn't have done.

‘Calm down. What sort of fit?'

‘You know, what do they call it? – a seizure!'

Peter, his eyes widening, said, ‘And you've left him there?'

‘I can't be here,' Jimmy wailed with an imploring look. ‘If I'm arrested it's the end of me.'

But Peter, shaking his head, was already on his way into the house. Jimmy, hoicking up his skirts, plunged onwards through the back garden, hearing only his quick wheezing breaths and the distant shriek of a police whistle.

‘AN ICEBERG ON
fire' was how one newspaper described the burning of the Crystal Palace. It transpired that heating pipes below the floorboards and years of accumulated dust had turned the place to tinder; 20,000 wooden chairs stored beneath the orchestra pit had provided extra kindling. How it had started was still a matter of doubt, though an electric short circuit was suspected. The fire had raged through the night, flames leaping as high as five hundred feet, so they said, and crowds flocked from all over to watch it. Private planes were chartered from Croydon airport for a bird's-eye view of the gigantic inferno, and the roads of south London were soon choked with cars bearing sightseers towards the spot. It took the fire services until dawn to bring the conflagration under control. All that remained of the magnificent edifice – designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 – was a mass of debris, fused glass and ashes, and the blackened skeleton of its steel frame. Photographs published over the following days were evocative of a bomb site.

The suddenness of its destruction stunned the public. The translucent glass palace, visible for miles around, had seemed as immovable a fixture of the landscape as the Pyramids. Despite its fragile appearance it had become a part of the national consciousness, home to countless exhibitions, concerts, meetings, performances, motor shows and flower shows, even a circus. Now, where once had stood a majestic symbol of Victorian enterprise and engineering, a terrible vacancy yawned. With it seemed to pass something of the Victorian age itself. There had been a grand scheme afoot to hold a celebration there in honour of Edward VIII's coronation.

Neither event would happen. The dust had not yet settled on the smoking ruins of the Palace when news of the royal crisis burst forth. It had been threatened for months but hitherto kept secret from most of the British public. A year that had begun with the death of one king was about to end with the abdication of another. The newspapers, pent up for so long, now flooded their pages with the tragedy of Edward and Mrs Simpson. Bishops and ministers were suddenly centre stage in the drama, enacted each day in columns of unarguable black and white. People queued at newsvendors' stalls – The King in love with an American, twice divorced! – hardly able to digest it all yet greedy for more. Some wondered whether the great institution of the monarchy would survive.

In the wake of this convulsion other news struggled to gain purchase. Interest in the case of fraudster and ex-Mosleyite Gerald Carmody vanished overnight, and nothing more was made of his unfortunate gull, the painter Stephen Wyley.

An item in the
Daily Mail
reported a raid on a house in Highgate, where men in evening gowns and make-up were engaged in ‘scenes of unspeakable vice and depravity'. The police were tipped off thanks to the sacrifice of a fellow officer who, masquerading as a partygoer, had infiltrated the event. Forty-five arrests were made.

In the same edition was a brief paragraph detailing the discovery of a woman's body on Hampstead Heath. Death had been caused by traumatic blows to the head. The victim's relatives had been informed.

Madeleine, seated alone, stared at the backs of the mourners ranged along the pews. It was a Catholic service, and many of them seemed unsure when to stand or to kneel. The church was decorated for Advent, with a crib stationed at the foot of the altar, next to the coffin. From the front pew came the steady, piteous whimpering of a woman she assumed to be the mother. Her gaze fell on the printed order of service, and the barely conceivable name on its cover.

NINA JANE LAND † 1904–1936 †

The hymns – ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind', ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine', ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is' – spirited her back to the convent. As she sang the last she felt an ache in her throat, and wondered why she had come to the funeral of a woman she barely knew. It was only by chance that she had even heard of her death. She had been on a tram in Kingsway when she happened to glance at someone's open newspaper and an item headed
ACTRESS FOUND SLAIN
had leapt out at her. The strange thing was that, even before she began reading it, she had known with a terrible certainty it was Nina. A few seconds later the man whose paper it was had got up and alighted from the tram, and so she'd had to wait until her stop to jump down and run along the street in search of a newspaper vendor. She had frantically riffled through the pages, like a parrot diving into its feathers, until she'd found the story, and read it with a galloping heart.

Her eyes had slid rapidly, distractedly, over the salient phrases:
shock and bafflement . . . senseless and brutal murder . . . a stage actress of renown
. . . The police said there was no indication that the victim had known her killer, though they were investigating the possibility that her body had been dumped on the Heath sometime after she was murdered. There had been no mention of tiepins or strangulation, but the horrific intuition worming inside her brain had not been quelled: the man from room 408 had somehow found his way to Nina. She had felt something rise in her gorge and had to hold herself very still before it passed.

A lady, stately in hat and veil, stepped up to the pulpit and read a poem that began ‘Fear no more the heat o' the sun'. At the end she explained, in a voice of quiet resignation, that this was her sister's favourite passage from Shakespeare. Madeleine saw her dab her eyes as she returned to the front pew, and felt a sudden stirring of loss. The priest in his even manner continued the obsequies, though she didn't take in any of it until the organ played, as a recessional, the adagio from the
Sonata Pathétique
. She kept her gaze averted as they slow-marched the coffin back down the aisle. The front pews emptied and people shuffled out, looking stiffly ahead, like sleepwalkers.

Outside the sky was the colour of damp flour, and the December cold pierced to the bone. The funeral cortège was waiting to set off. The mourners, she realised, fell into two distinct categories. One was the stricken gathering of Nina's relatives, at a loss, with her mewling mother at its centre. The other was a gravely flamboyant company of West End folk, trying to keep their voices to a decorous volume but now and then betraying themselves with loud exclamations of sympathy or grief. Madeleine wished she had slipped off before the end, instead of being the only person there who didn't know anyone. As the hearse pulled away she obeyed an instinct to cross herself, and she started up the drive.

She had not gone very far when she heard footsteps hurrying behind her, and turned to find a man whose face she thought familiar. He was wearing a black armband on his overcoat. His face looked drawn, and almost bruised about his eyes.

‘Um, Madeleine, isn't it? I'm sorry, I don't know your – I'm Stephen Wyley. We once met.'

Now she knew him. The artist. ‘Yes, I remember. How are you?' It didn't sound like the right thing to say, but she was stumped for anything else.

‘Oh . . . you know,' he said, with a vague little wave back at the church. ‘I'm finding it rather difficult to – it feels like some hideous dream I'm going to wake up from.' He stared off into the distance.

Madeleine sensed the tiredness in his voice, in the twitch of his eye. With some feelings it was impossible to demonstrate, or even, really, to fathom. She said haltingly, ‘We hardly knew each other, and yet – for all that, I remember thinking how much I liked her. And it's awful to know that the one thing I should have said to her I never did.'

‘What was that?'

She shook her head, as if she still couldn't believe it. ‘I should have –
thanked
her. For what she did. For saving my life.' And she knew at that moment why it had mattered so much that she should come to this funeral.

Stephen, sunk deep in his own misery, said, ‘You're right. It's always the things we mean to say . . .' He looked up, and focused. ‘Are you going on to –?'

‘Oh, no. I honestly don't know a soul here.'

‘Nor I . . .' He shrugged, looking lost, and by unspoken consent they fell into step up the drive. The temperature made frozen plumes of their breath. It was the right sort of day for a funeral, she thought; warmth, sunshine, birdsong would have been a wretched intrusion. Once they were on the street she prepared her expression for a parting of the ways. She had imagined that he would hurry off, their mutual commiseration done, but instead he halted of a sudden and looked at her.