Death of a Mystery Writer (6 page)

She looked closely at her face. Forty-nine, and showing it: scrawny, worried, tired hair, unsightly throat. People said she was at a difficult age. All her ages had been difficult, and they had left their mark. The only thing to be said about her face, she thought, backing away from the mirror, was that it was undoubtedly aristocratic. It had style. It had breeding. Which is more than can be said for Oliver's, she thought grimly.

Oliver Fairleigh playing the country squire brought out the gentlewoman in his wife.

 • • • 

When she finally emerged from her bedroom, Eleanor met Mark on the landing and went down with him. He was trying to be bright, but not very coherently. He had not put on a dinner jacket, and his mother suspected he had had more to drink. He had taken trouble with his tie, but it was somehow not quite square. The degree of concentration required to take one stair after another seemed that much greater than when he had arrived. Presumably the suitcase had contained a bottle. Eleanor Fairleigh-Stubbs smothered a sigh, and kept up light conversation. Mark replied, but too loudly.

Her husband was already in the lounge, and he welcomed them genially (again it was that landlord's heartiness that grated on his wife) and sat them down. Mark tended to slump, and kept blinking his great, full, self-pitying eyes.

“Eleanor, my dear, a sherry for you? Mark—a gin and tonic?” He turned to the drinks cabinet. Eleanor noted that it was already unlocked—so as not to bring too obviously to Mark's notice the fact that because of him drink was always kept under lock and key in this house? How sensitive of Oliver, she thought, surrendering herself to unrealism. Oliver brought the drinks over with a paternal air.

“Well, Mark,” he said, sipping his own dry sherry, “what have you been doing with yourself?”

“I've been—I've been”—Mark took a gulp at his gin and tonic—“I've been making a lot of contacts.” He put his glass down, carelessly, with a minor crash.

“Hope they're good ones. I remember when I was your age—before your time, my dear—I was mad about making contacts. People told me the literary world was an in-group, a clique, that I'd never get anywhere unless I got myself in with them. What a lot of pushing and shoving I went in for! I've never made such efforts! But they paid off, too, some of those contacts.”

He sat back after this flow of reminiscence in pop-eyed contemplation of his past, and let out a theatrical sigh of satisfaction. Mark did not seem entirely to have been following, but he said: “You've got to have contacts.”

“One of them,” continued Sir Oliver, after giving his son what was intended as a kindly look, “was your cousin Darcy, my dear—”

“Oh, dear, Darcy—”

“Yes, well, perhaps not a happy topic of conversation, but I met you at his place, you remember. And we were engaged within the month. Ah, Terence—and Bella!”

Oliver Fairleigh's two younger children came in together, chattering happily. Both were impeccably, even stylishly dressed, and Oliver Fairleigh could not forbear a glance from Terence's dinner jacket to the slightly bedraggled lounge suit that his elder son was still wearing, the appearance of which was not helped by Mark's slumping posture in the easy chair. Terence was smart and beautiful, with a classically regular face, distant blue eyes, and long, fair hair, cut into a sort of halo round his face. He was, Oliver Fairleigh thought, a suitable escort for the aristocracy, and he was spending his time touring the country with a band of raucous adolescents. At any other time this thought might have prompted him to an apoplectic outburst against his hair, or whatever grievance might be most conveniently to hand, but today, apparently, he was grateful for small mercies, and his surface geniality was undisturbed. He fussed over Bella and got her a drink, and the two younger children sat down on the sofa—elegant, slightly remote, handsome, and well-heeled. They looked like a glossy advertisement: posed, almost too perfect.

“The Woodstocks will be here before long, I hope,” said Sir Oliver, settling back into his own chair and sipping his sherry again. “You remember Ben Woodstock, Mark? You used to be great friends at one time.”

“Never liked him,” said Mark thickly.

“No, so often one doesn't,” said his father, popping his pudgy
cheeks out. “I hope you'll be nice to the little wife, my dear. She seemed to be a little lacking in confidence, poor child, and of course she doesn't know the young people, as Ben does.”

Eleanor bit back a reply to the effect that it was not she who was in the habit of intimidating the meek and mild, but she accepted, as always, the role allotted to her in the play Oliver was currently performing, and merely said: “Yes—that's often very difficult when one is newly married.”

“I'll get the lad an introduction to Sir Edwin Macpherson, I think. I had a slight impression that might be why he invited us round last weekend. That should please him. Not that it will do any good, I'm afraid. No publisher is going to take on an author merely on my say-so. Still, the lad will have had his chance; and who knows, perhaps he has talent. Let's hope so.”

At that moment Surtees, who was butler for the evening, ushered in the Woodstocks, dressed in their best, which was somehow not good enough; they still seemed slightly moth-eaten and destined for failure. As Sir Oliver overpowered them with genial hospitality, the little wife let out an audible sigh of relief.

Sir Oliver led them round, introducing Celia Woodstock to the younger members of his family. Mark was blearily friendly in a way that suggested he would not know who she was if he met her again tomorrow; Terence was cool; Bella slightly distant: she cast her eye over the large floral pattern on Celia Woodstock's dress, looked directly into her face, smiled politely, then said no more. Her father more than made up for it by seating her in the best armchair, fussing over her drink, and engaging her in conversation. Somewhat surprisingly, they found that they had friends in common.

Within half an hour, Celia Woodstock was feeling almost at home, and her only qualms occurred when she caught sight of the elegant perfection of Bella, sitting on the sofa with her husband, and talking—not about old times, as one surely ought to on such occasions, but about the world of publishing and journalism. They were very animated. Ben's thin face was lit up, as she seldom had seen it, and his hollow-chested body was alive with energy.
In the pause necessitated by Sir Oliver getting up to throw a log on the (highly superfluous) fire, she noted Mark, already on his third gin, and not focusing his eyes well; she noted Terence and his mother, deep in a conversation about dates and recording schedules, and she thought how good-looking he was, but how—somehow—not really
nice.

Then Surtees came in, and announced dinner.

Dinner was good. Dinner was Mrs. Moxon at the peak of her form. It would not have been like her to let any inadequacies in her department disturb the equanimity of Oliver Fairleigh on his birthday dinner, though she was quite willing for it to be disturbed from any other quarter, being a woman who thrived on disorder. But when Surtees brought the plates down to the kitchen she was disappointed by his reports. There had been no explosion.

Everyone enjoyed the dinner, except Mark, who toyed nervously with it, downing a great deal of wine and seeming more interested in getting himself safely hoisted onto a cloud of oblivion than in anything going on around him.

Celia Woodstock put odious comparisons with her own performance firmly from her mind—after all, she thought, with the doggedness of the little woman, why
should
my dinners be compared with those of people who can afford to employ a cook?—and concentrated firmly on two things: her food and her host. She was seated beside Sir Oliver, and he was treating her with unending charm, asking her opinion on current events, showering her with anecdotes of the literary great, giving her fatherly advice, and even admiring her dress in a manner that seemed sincere. Celia Woodstock expanded into her dark green and orange patterned print frock, and came close to enjoying herself. It was not, unfortunately, possible entirely to relax: the dreadful shadow cast by Sir Oliver's performance last Sunday prevented her quite doing that. But she listened sensibly, she glowed
now and then with pleasure, and she talked more than she usually did.

“Of course, I know people say that Ben is mad to think of becoming a writer full-time,” she said confidingly. “But he felt there was no job he could take that would leave him with the peace of mind to write, let alone the time.”

“A good point, that, very!” said Oliver Fairleigh, gazing at her with fatuous good humor which a connoisseur of his performances might have caught as an imitation of a dim-witted Wode-housian club bore.

“After all, there are only two of us,” said Celia, looking at him appealingly, as if he were an old family friend to whom she had gone for advice. “The cottage is ours, you know, and I'm perfectly capable of getting a job if necessary. Not”—she lowered her voice—“that it will be. As a matter of fact, we have a little more coming in than people imagine.”

Sir Oliver concealed a flinch at the vulgarity of the phrasing, and entered into the spirit of her confidences. “I'm glad to hear it. Something tucked away, eh? A little nest egg? I wouldn't want to appear inquisitive, but I thought the family was—not to put too fine a point on it—broke.”

Celia Woodstock lowered her voice, dropped her eyes, and said: “Not quite.”

“Good, good,” said Oliver Fairleigh, horribly avuncular. “An independent income's the saving of a writer. Not a large one, necessarily, of course—”

“Oh, it's not large—” said Celia hurriedly.

“But enough, eh? Well, I have a little surprise for you, my dear.” He patted her hand, and she looked down at his pudgy scrivener's paw in some consternation. “I thought it might help if I introduced your husband to Sir Edwin Macpherson. Got the idea he wanted something of the kind, don't know why. So I thought I'd take him to lunch, sometime in the next week or two—just the three of us.” Forestalling her little whinnies of pleasure, he directed his glance down the table. “Ben, my boy—”

At the roar from his host Ben Woodstock looked up hastily
and apprehensively from his low and intense conversation with Bella Fairleigh.

“I'm just telling your little wife, Ben, that I'm hoping to take you to lunch with Eddie Macpherson, if you could manage it. Do you think you could, eh?”

Ben Woodstock blushed pink, stuttered his thanks, and (as Sir Oliver turned his attention back to his food) looked inquiringly at his wife. Bella looked coldly in the same direction, but found Celia Woodstock gazing back at her, perfectly straight, with something close to a smile of triumph on her face.

“Of course,” said Sir Oliver, turning to her again, and lowering his voice from a lordly bellow to a lordly whisper, “beyond the lunch there's nothing much I can do. People think I can, but I can't. Can't force a man to publish a book if he doesn't want to. You're a sensible woman—you understand that. But we'll hope for the best.”

“This
is
kind,” said Celia sincerely. “Ben is so pleased, I can see that. And his mother will be too.”

“Nice woman,” said Sir Oliver, licking his fat lips. “Had a hard time of it. Sad to see the old families go down.”

“Oh, it is. The Woodstocks used to be the first family around here, so Ben says. Still, you never know: Ben always says the gentry have great staying power.”

“Does he?” said Oliver Fairleigh, gazing without any overt irony at Ben Woodstock's unimpressive form.

“I think over the years they've developed ways of holding on to what they've got,” said Celia Woodstock, conveying regretfully to her mouth the last of her boeuf bourguignon.

 • • • 

“Bella,” said her mother from across the table, anxious to disentangle her from the low, intense conversation with young Woodstock, which she could see was worrying his dull little wife: “We were wondering if you could help us to get a new gardener.”

Bella raised her head and looked at her mother with something close to disdain. “Mother dear, I suppose if you met Elizabeth David you'd ask her to find you a cook.”

“Well, I don't see why not. . . .” said Eleanor Fairleigh vaguely.

“I'm afraid that, though I'm working on a gardening newspaper, I have no contact whatever with gardeners. In fact, no one I meet has the slightest knowledge of gardening. We just put the paper together, and we hardly see the people who write it.”

“What a shame,” said her mother. “So impersonal, somehow . . .”

“The best way to get a good gardener, Mother, is to pay well,” said Bella, and turned back to Ben Woodstock. There was nothing for it for Eleanor but to talk to her sons.

“Are you still thinking of moving, Mark?” she asked her eldest.

“Sorry . . . ?” Mark had been looking dully at his plate, still well filled, and jiggling his glass to attract Surtees's attention.

“Are you still thinking of moving, dear?”

“I've moved.”

“Already, dear? Where to? You will leave me your new address before you go, won't you?”

“Islington,” said Mark, as if he hadn't quite heard. He thought for a bit, looking drearily ahead, and then he said: “It's smaller. I didn't need all that space.”

“I'm sure it will be better, dear. After all, it will be less to keep clean.”

Mark looked at his mother as if she were crazy, but was diverted by the sight of Surtees with a full bottle in his hand.

“Mark,” said Terence, from his mother's other side, “is not particularly interested in keeping his place clean. Nor will I be when I have somewhere permanent of my own. Cleanliness is very low on my list of priorities.”