The Lively Dead Read online

  “Provided I don’t go to pieces. Hell!”

  Clearly it was a moment to switch the talk back to the FCP.

  “But George,” said Lydia. “He wouldn’t let himself be used, just like that, would he? Bait? He’s our friend.”

  “Darling, if you think about it honestly you’ll see that you’ve got two sorts of friends, ones you like and ones you trust. Sometimes they overlap, not always. I like old George very much, but I’m quite sure he’d slit our throats if he needed to.”

  This business about liking and trusting was an old argument, so safe in Richard’s present state. She let him ramble through a list of all the people they knew, putting them into one category or the other, a soothing game.

  “It’s more marked with you,” he said. “It’s natural to feel you can trust people from your own caste, but you don’t approve of your own caste, so you tend not to like them.”

  “Balls. Anyway, I think you’re wrong about George. He’s not part of an FCP, or if he is he hasn’t been told. I suppose there’s just a chance you might be right about the rest of it—it was a bit odd, in some ways …”

  “About ten to one against, I’d say.”

  “Do you think I ought to warn Mr Obb?”

  “Umm. You actually want them to stay? What Diarghi told you is probably true—he sounds too bright to tell you fibs you could check.”

  “Of course I do. I mean, even if I’d been wanting to get them out before, I’d dig my heels in if I thought we were being pushed around by the bloody Kremlin, whatever they’d done, almost. Damn. The idea makes me so angry I’m beginning to become ungooey.”

  Richard laughed but still didn’t really relax. They lay and talked almost till dawn.

  Chapter 17

  The dinner-party for Lalage went very well at first. Lydia often felt that the only mystery in cooking is why so many cook-book-writers, however inspirational, are quite unable to string together a series of clear and unambiguous sentences. She relied on half a dozen books which understood that a recipe is no more than an assembly instruction; with these she found she could produce good meals with no sweat. Taking the whole day off from building operations she shopped; got the silver out of the bank; improvised a table out of two tea-chests, a door and a sheet of hardboard; pinned up about thirty of Dickie’s gaudy battle-pictures to cover the patched and mottled walls of the back room; and there, by the time Dickie came back from school, was a dining-room where yesterday had been a desert. He was thrilled with his art gallery and spent the hours until his bed-time touching in a few more explosions and dead bodies and dive-bombers.

  The wine was no problem, because Richard had inherited some, which he kept with a wine-merchant in the City and refused to sell, though somebody had once told Lydia it would fetch twenty quid a bottle. As she wasn’t allowed to convert it into floor-boards or stair-carpets she got a certain kick out of simply knocking the stuff back; to drink it like that was an acceptable sort of revenge on a society that had got its values so crazy as to price a bottle of plonk higher than a week’s social security payments.

  Richard put Dickie to bed. They now had a night-time ritual which involved an adventure behind enemy lines and the use of Paul’s Morse transmitter to get the vital message through; it had barely finished its last sleepy beep when Lalage arrived carrying a box of chocolates as big as a tombstone. The other guests were a married couple who lectured in anthropology at London University, Paul Vaklins, and a strange pair, unmarried, who lived in a basement across the road and sent a small girl who didn’t seem to be their own child to Dickie’s school. They ran an ornamental leather stall in the Portobello Road and turned up for the party wearing identical caftans. Another oddness about them was that they were both devoted workers for the local Tories. Lydia had only asked them on impulse, the morning she’d rung up the Russian Embassy and learnt that George had already been posted back to Damascus, but they made a good mix, and the party went well and easily until Lydia, coming back from the kitchen with Richard’s favourite pudding (which was a mound of sweetened cream cheese piled with pears soaked in claret) noticed that an extra guest had arrived.

  He announced himself as a softness in the shadows, half-seen disturbing shapes in Dickie’s dim-lit pictures, a shimmer in the candle-flames, a mutter under the talk, a vapour creeping from the wine. He was Eros.

  When Lalage had been only fourteen she had first stolen one of Lydia’s blokes, a rather thick lock forward called Pete, just to show that she could. She’d done the same several times since, usually letting the poor sod down with a bump as soon as she’d thoroughly spoilt things. She’d even tried Richard once, but to the best of Lydia’s belief had got nowhere. So, though the purpose of the party had been to interest Paul and Lalage in each other, when it happened—happened like that, with an intense flow of invisible energies between them, strong enough to disrupt the talk and make the male anthropologist knock his wine-glass over—the memory of all those old insults rose against Lydia’s teeth like vomit. She pressed her lips hard together and spooned the pears out in angry dollops. When she saw Richard, oblivious, smiling at something the female caftan-wearer was telling him she almost slung his pear and cheese in his face.

  After that the evening became thoroughly sour for a while, and was made no better when they moved next door for coffee by Paul’s attempt to behave decently and accept the re-shuffle of talking-partners. But Lalage broke that up and it was a relief when she suddenly sprang a migraine, too agonising for it to be safe for her to drive herself. Paul gravely accepted the charade and took her home.

  “That’s quite a large car,” said Richard as they watched the tail-lights fade. “I wonder if they’ll wait to reach a bed.”

  Lydia kicked him as hard as she could on the shin.

  “Hi! What was that for?”

  “I didn’t think you’d even noticed. The bloody little bitch!”

  “But I thought that was the object of the exercise.”

  “And she’s left that bloody dress behind.”

  “And her car. Cheer up, she’ll get a parking ticket in the morning, That’ll be something.”

  Lydia laughed, found and squeezed his hand and allowed herself to be led back to talk genteelly to the other guests till midnight.

  Chapter 18

  The paint-brush was beautifully loaded, fat with white gloss but not dripping, when the telephone rang. Lydia cursed.

  It had been mid-morning before she’d got down to what she thought of as proper work. The first two hours had been spent in returning the “dining-room” to a bare-board state in which she could work at it, and this she’d done grudgingly, with an unusual sense of resentment that Richard should get out of it by going off to his crammers, and another layer of resentment that she’d let herself in for entertaining according to the mores of a life-style which she detested. During her coffee-break she had sat sniffing the odourless steam and wondering whether she was getting flu, or had eaten a dubious mussel, or was enduring for the first time in her life a real hangover. Just to suggest these possibilities was to dismiss them, and at the same time to force herself to admit that her bile and spleen were caused by Lalage. The physical symptoms—dusty tongue, half headache, dreariness in the blood—were the result of a bad night’s sleep, itself the result of undigested fury. The mental symptom was self-disgust, trying to masquerade as self-righteousness.

  So, though there was still plenty of clearing-up to be done she had settled down after her coffee-break to a job she normally enjoyed, laying a smoothly professional layer of gloss paint onto a skirting-board. It was going well—paint just the right thickness, brush not losing any hairs, her own hand steady and precise—when the telephone rang. I know who that is, she thought. She was right.

  “I’m sorry,” said the husky but childish voice.

  For the moment Lydia was unable to speak.

  “Is that you, Liz
?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. I behaved unspeakably.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes it does. Honestly, I just couldn’t help myself.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re a saint. You don’t go about behaving unspeakably because you can’t help yourself.”

  “Yes I do. I can’t help myself … if you were here, I’d hit you, hard.”

  “Oh, darling! But …”

  “Forget it. It’s all ancient history.”

  “I didn’t realise that you …”

  “Now listen. I’m not cross with you. I’m furious.”

  “But …”

  “Shut up! I’m not cross with you for hitting it off with Paul, because that’s what I wanted, roughly. I’m not cross with you for spoiling the party, because you didn’t, it was OK after you left, and anyway that sort of party is stupid. But I am furious with you because I can’t help it. That’s all. Thank you for ringing. You’ve left your dress and your car behind. I’ll be in this evening if you want to come and pick them up.”

  “Hang on. There’s two other things.”

  “Yes?”

  “You probably won’t be very pleased about this either, but I felt so awful that I’ve bought you a tree.”

  “A what?”

  “It isn’t a very big one—I mean it won’t grow into a spreading oak or anything. It’s very pretty. I saw one in a friend’s garden and it has delicious little whitey-pink flowers most of the winter. Prunus subhirtella autumnalis. I thought you might put it where the roses came out, and pavement underneath … Liz, I’ll cancel it if you don’t want it. I just thought …”

  “No, it’s all right. I mean, thanks, darling, that’ll be lovely, it’s just what I wanted. I expect. I didn’t know what to do with that bit, so it’s nice to have my mind made up for me.”

  “Oh, super! You wouldn’t like two? I mean, a pair? I mean … oh, pull yourself together, woman! I’ve been so worried. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Say it with trees.”

  “Oh, Liz, you are a saint! Shall I order another one?”

  “One will be masses, thanks. What was the other thing? I’ve got a wet paint-brush.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry … I didn’t know … yes, of course I did, because there’s always something like that. Er, it’s about Paul, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s my new tenant. He’s a Livonian exile, and now he’s Minister of Maritime Affairs in the Government. He’s got his own ship, and he seems to be pretty rich. But he likes to do things for himself. He’s very efficient with his hands.”

  Lalage giggled.

  “Anything else?” hissed Lydia.

  “Oh, God, I am putting my foot in it. I haven’t fallen for anyone that way for absolute years. Him too, I think. We’re the same kind of animal. Usually I like to see my blokes crawl a bit, sometimes … but … I suppose it’s because we’re both utterly selfish, so at least we’ve got that to respect each other for … you can be honest with somebody like that …”

  “Dickie adores him,” said Lydia. She knew there was no point in setting up prickly zarebas of anger and envy—they’d only have to come down again.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” said Lalage, surprisingly. “Not just Dickie—all of you. Did you know Paul’s absolutely obsessed by you? I don’t mean just you, Liz, as a potential mark, I mean the set-up. He’s like an anthropologist who wants to know all about a tribe.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  It looked as though the zarebas were going to have to go up after all.

  “I told him to mind his own business. I was pretty shirty at first, because I thought it meant he’d only fallen for me because he couldn’t have you—I mean, someone like that you’re a sort of challenge to, aren’t you? Then I saw it wasn’t that, so I told him things anyone could find out, like Dad being a surgeon and marrying twice, and Richard having been in the army, and you being a bit of a left-wing nut. I let him look over the hedge, but I didn’t ask him into your garden.”

  “I expect that’s all right.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Well?”

  “Look, Liz, this is pure hunch. But there’s something going on.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of something, Lal? Do you mean he’s using his ship to smuggle heroin, or something like that?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re in it, though. I’m not even sure he is. Of course as soon as I got to the office I started to find out all I could about him. His ship’s OK, and he’s set up a nice steady two-way series of contracts between London and Helsinki. There’s enough loot there to support his life-style. But … look, he’s not really the same sort as your old men in your Government, is he? What’s he doing there?”

  “He’s a Liv. The Russians chucked a lot of people out. They don’t all have to be the same as each other.”

  “I know, but … one idea I had was he might be involved in some sort of currency juggling, using your old men as a front. I can’t quite see how it would work, if it’s roubles—there’s no profit in getting roubles out, only getting dollars in, and then the profit’s in Russia—perhaps it’s something to do with old Czarist bonds, or there might be an unredeemed Livonian loan or something. Would you mind, Liz?”

  “Mind? Oh, I see. I don’t really want my old men taken for a ride, but otherwise I’m all for it. The more rats there are in the capitalist system, the sooner it’ll fall apart.”

  “Squeak, squeak.”

  “Any rats that get fat will be collected and cooked by recipes in the Little Red Cookbook.”

  “I think you’re marvellous, darling. Do take care. I don’t believe in much except my own comfort, but while you and Richard are OK I know there are higher things in life. Bye, darling.”

  Lydia went back to her painting. She was glad Lalage had called, not because it had really settled anything but because her own fury had somehow unknotted itself during the last few minutes and ravelled smoothly away to nothing. At least I haven’t got rats, she thought. Only rots which, checked in one place, could still put out creeping grey strands, invisible behind paper and plaster, to reach and infect fresh timber, so that all the work had to be done again. That’s what the world’s really like, she thought. Rats? Rats!

  Chapter 19

  -.. -..- -..- snickered the key. Lydia lifted down from the shelf the stopwatch she had used for rallying before she ever met Richard. Dickie crouched in the corner behind a pile of cardboard boxes, waiting for the answer to his call sign.

  After a brief pause the metallic note beeped .--. ...- three times. She pressed the starter knob. Paul had recorded quite a long message and seemed to going slightly faster; trying to read the letters in her head she got lost almost at once, so she returned to modifying the back suspension of her dream car. When the Morse ended she pressed the stop button and slid her sketches under the armchair. From the hiding-place a pigeon crooned.

  “All clear,” said Lydia. “A patrol came past five minutes ago. I gave the corporal a slice of fruit cake.”

  Dickie’s head poked up like a gopher’s from its burrow. He even sniffed the air for danger. Then on tip-toe he crept across the room and slid a sheet of paper onto Lydia’s lap. The lines of dots and dashes were far neater than any writing he had ever done.

  “Couldn’t you write the letters underneath, darling?” coaxed Lydia. “I’m only an ignorant cobbler’s wife. You can’t expect me to read Morse.”

  “I’ll read it,” he whispered. His lips puckered to shape each letter but he didn’t say them aloud until he had wrestled a word clear.

  “Ammo …
train … at … pass … 0300 … what’s huh rrr sss?”

  “Hours. It’s a short way of spelling it. That means three o’clock in the morning. I’ll be in bed, fast asleep.”

  “I’ll be up in the pass with Aaku, of course.”

  He picked his way through the message, making three mistakes and twice needing help with words that didn’t pronounce themselves easily—Paul was very clever about avoiding those. Lydia did a quick sum. Dickie was receiving at just under five words a minute now, when a month before he had been taking a sulky minute to drag one word out of ordinary letters. The Morse code, by reaching his mind through his ear, had somehow by-passed whatever was causing the blockage between mind and eye. Even the dots and dashes on the paper were representations of sounds, and he seemed able to use them because of that. The next stage was to persuade him that letters were really much the same.

  Lydia, miming secrecy and caution, fetched from its hiding-place behind the bookshelf an old fountain pen.

  “Number Eight brought that this morning,” she said.

  Forgetting to go to his secret radio Dickie lay on the floor, unscrewed the cap of the pen and teased out the cylinder of paper that Lydia had hidden there. He was painfully turning the letters into dots and dashes when the phone rang.

  “May I speak to Lady Timms?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Ah, good. This is Diarghi, from the Russian Embassy. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. You never sent me those references. I was beginning to wonder …”

  “Exactly. Well, I have an apology to make. Baltic affairs are not my subject, and I’m afraid I relied too much on memory. When I came to check the references, I discovered that I’d made a mistake. What I told you about Busch is approximately correct, but I’d confused Linden with another man.”

  “Oh! Are you sure?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Well, our Central Library has a run of Hansards, and when I was taking some books back I thought I’d see if I couldn’t find something, and I did.”