Hindsight Page 17

  ‘You will of course have guessed what had happened. It was the other woman who, for once, had been merely feigning drunk. The whole thing had been planned. Even while O’Connell had been dancing closer and closer to Isidore, stimulating him, then letting him catch her, Benison had been behind her shoulder, gasping and laughing. And now at the climax of his imagined triumph he felt hands at the knot of his blindfold, saw the face of O’Connell contorted beneath him, heard Benison’s voice in his ear, saying “Boo!”

  ‘He disengaged himself and staggered to his feet. She ran to the bedroom, turned in the doorway, kissed her finger to him, went in and locked the door.’

  ‘Good lord,’ I said.

  ‘A ridiculous incident.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Is that all? Is that Isidore Steen’s heart of darkness? I laughed when he told me, delighted that the affair was now irrevocably over. He stared at me for a while. I apologised. He rose and left the room. I heard him moving around but was asleep by the time the outer door opened and closed. When I got up I found on my typewriter an envelope full of money and a note saying that I could stay in the apartment as long as it lasted. I chose not to. I used the money to buy a passage to Rangoon. I did not meet or correspond with Isidore Steen again.’

  I felt dazed. My mind was full of an image of Molly stalking up on me behind the Spanish chestnut, and how my heart bounded when she said ‘Boo!’ in my ear.

  ‘The incident, though true, has symbolic weight,’ said Smith. ‘And I think you will agree that it also has what they call box-office potential.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘What could he? I believe that he already knew in his heart that The Fanatics was still-born, and I suspect that the incident—his pursuit of Benison being so bound up in his writing of the book—may have brought that knowledge into the open. When the one ended in an appalling and humiliating débâcle, he found the same was true of the other. All he could do was take his revenge in his own way, though few would have recognised it as such. Very effective it turned out to be.’

  I was hardly listening. Another confirmatory parallel had struck me.

  ‘She cheated over the brandy, of course,’ I said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The tumbler she gave Daisy. It would have been tea or something. And the same when she sat down to drink with Steen—hers wouldn’t have been brandy. Don’t you remember, with the naval officers at Paddery …’

  I looked up to see his gaze on me, all its old ferocious power, its sense of somehow abstract malevolence, glaring out from the red-rimmed eyes. He had told his story in a level, deep, near-whisper. Not even his account of the climax, or his mention of its erotic potential in the cinema, had altered his tone. I had wondered whether the story was rehearsed—he had implied that he had not told it before, and perhaps the ordered and formal syntax was natural to him. In a sense I had been a lay figure, a mere intermediary through whom he was speaking to Dobbs. Now, for the first time, he turned the full energy of his personality—undiminished by age—on me.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ I explained. ‘I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to confuse the issue, but I’m glad it’s come up. I’ve always wanted a chance to thank you. You were about the best teacher I ever had.’

  I thought he hadn’t heard me. He continued to stare at me with what seemed a mixture of hatred and distrust.

  ‘A contemptible profession,’ he said suddenly. ‘Now I am tired and must ask you to go. It seems to me that I have told you more than enough to persuade Mr Dobbs that my assistance is absolutely necessary to him. You will make it clear that I retain the copyright in this matter. I expect an immediate answer.’

  ‘I’ll write to him as soon as I get home,’ I said. ‘His secretary tells me he’s had a bit of a relapse, but assuming he gets over it he should be able to make a preliminary response in a week or so. If there’s going to be any serious delay I’ll let you know.’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘That will have to do,’ he said.

  I left.

  Mrs Smith was waiting for me in the passage. I wanted to speak to her anyway, to get the telephone number, but she put her finger to her lips and beckoned. I followed her further up the passage into another sitting-room, smaller than her husband’s and furnished with run-of-the-mill chintzes. The only untidiness came from a sewing-basket on the floor. She seemed to have been working on a petit-point stool-cover, to a design supplied by a shop.

  ‘I do hope you don’t mind,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I can’t resist asking you to sign one of your books for me.’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll do as many as you’ve got.’

  ‘Oh, how kind of you. I didn’t dare ask.’

  She had half a dozen, hardback, with a nice, thoroughly-read look. I sat down, found a pen and started to put my name on the fly-leaves.

  ‘Did you tell him who you were?’ she asked.

  ‘Only by accident.’

  ‘Oh … what did he say?’

  ‘Not much. He didn’t seem too pleased.’

  ‘You mustn’t mind that. He’s got such terribly high standards about books and things. That’s why I sneaked you in here like this. I don’t want him teasing me about the sort of nonsense I like reading. Oh dear, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘I won’t take it to heart.’

  One learns there’s no point in being upset—the valuation is probably just—but one can’t help it. Mrs Smith was such a thoroughly nice woman that I minded less than sometimes. One cannot expect people who don’t belong to the book world to pick their phrases with delicacy. She must have been thinking along the same lines.

  ‘You wouldn’t think, would you, that I had literary blood in my veins?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not hereditary. My family were lawyers and politicians mostly.’

  She took the books from me and put them back on the shelf. They clearly had their own places in what was a useful collection from the narrow field in which I work, the genre of pure detective story, lying somewhere between the crime novel and the thriller. I was about to ask if she’d like me to get Harry Keating’s signature when she said, turning the last book over in her hands, ‘I hope you make a reasonable living out of it, Mr Rogers.’

  ‘Provided I keep writing.’

  ‘At least you’re still in copyright.’

  ‘Not much use when you’re out of print.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose not.’

  As she led me to the front door she took no special trouble to creep past her husband’s room, or perhaps she relied on his deafness. It struck me as odd that that impressive intelligence could be so simply misled—how little any of us know about each other. And even when we attempt to communicate, how easily the signals are garbled, as with Mrs Smith’s response to my telling her how her husband had reacted on finding out who I was. That one word ‘who’ had meant two different people, in his case a child, in hers a writer. Strange.

  As she held the front door she looked up into my eyes and said, ‘You will do your best for us, won’t you? For old times’ sake … Rogue.’

  ‘I’ll try, but it’s not really in my hands. I’m just a messenger.’

  ‘We’ve had a marvellous life. It would be so sad to spoil it now. He’s older than he looks.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. I owe him something.’

  ‘Oh, so do I!’

  ‘Well, goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye. Thank you for coming. I’m glad it was you.’

  13

  I barely noticed the journey home to Hampshire. My autonomous driving system took over while my conscious mind tried to sort itself out. Even there I seemed to have several levels of preoccupation. At the surface my first concern was to make sure I had the story clear for Dobbs. I had taken a tape-recorder along to the interview but confron
ted by Smith’s vehemence over copyright had not even suggested using it. This didn’t worry me—though I could not have repeated what he said word for word I had all its details vivid in my mind. I ran these inward spools a couple of times to prove to myself that this was so.

  Then, still at the surface level, I started to wonder whether the story was true. It smelt of contrivance, but whose? Molly’s, or Smith’s? I felt that Dobbs, lacking my memories of Paddery, was likely to plump for Smith. Even on psychological grounds, insofar as the mind of such a man is readable, it seemed a Smith-like contrivance; Measure for Measure was his kind of play. If was clear he needed the money; he had every incentive to make his contribution seem indispensable, to invent scenes which would appeal to the box-office … I swore at myself for not asking Mrs Smith whether he went much to the cinema—it would have been a help to know whether he realised that Miss Remick was unlikely to consent to play the scene he had described to me …

  But he had told me something very close to the truth. I was sure of that. Or rather I was sure that Molly had at some point played blind man’s buff with a would-be lover, substituted Daisy for herself and then said ‘Boo!’ in the man’s ear. There was the detail about the fake drinks, too. And Steen’s revulsion from Daisy. It was strange to me, because nothing Smith had said about Steen had mitigated my dislike of the man, that I so deeply understood how he had felt over this. I realised I had not cared for Daisy at all. She had frightened me badly, though in between the first meeting in the chestnut grove and my nightmare on the track to the Temple I had managed to tell myself that my fear was only that she would do or say something to embarrass me. And …

  Yes, there was something else to do with Daisy, some other parallel. I was aware of its presence at a deeper level, as one is aware of a large fish in dark water, not by seeing the animal but by vague stirrings in its element. Anyway, I had no doubt I was going to tell Dobbs that as far as I was concerned Smith’s story was ninety per cent true, at least. After all, hadn’t I promised little Mrs Smith I would do my best for them?

  The conscious thought of her made me realise that all the time since we met on her doormat I had been in a state of mild shock at the strangeness of her marriage. The short interview in her sitting-room had if anything added to the feeling. She said they’d had a marvellous life. She talked as though she had nothing whatever to hide, apart from her taste in books. She assumed I knew all about her. Perhaps it was because of this openness, this lack of mystery and secrets, that I was well down the M3 before I realised that she must be Daisy’s daughter. And, if Smith’s story were true, by Isidore Steen.

  The reader probably got there pages ago—the experienced reader three chapters ago. In fact the experienced reader will know by now how Christopher Wither died, and at whose hand (the latter question pretty obvious, I’d have thought). This is just an example of the artificiality of the genre, of all fiction perhaps, in that it takes place outside you, allows you to inspect it, choose your distance from it and so on; whereas with real happenings you take place inside them, and the more closely they concern you the less likely you are to be able to grasp the relationship of their individual parts. In detective fiction, with the demand that the plot should function as a mechanism, the relationship of those parts has to be unreally precise and clear, and the reader has to remain well outside. Since this story seems to have got into book form after all, I feel it is only polite to apologise to the reader for not presenting him with his customary obfuscations. Where was I? Half-way down the M3.

  I pulled over into the slow lane and drove the next stretch at forty. I began to see things, to feel some of that excitement that is generated when the plot of a new book starts pulling itself together and one’s random and disparate inventions turn out to slot into each other as if they had been designed to do so. At first the excitement was attended by the same kind of pleasure, but gradually, as I could not resist picking away at the scab that had grown over those old wounds, pleasure gave way to alarm, and then to horror.

  Steen had died in 1927. The date had stuck in my mind because of the mild coincidence of it being the year I was born. The copyrights, as Smith had said, had expired in 1977. Mrs Smith had also talked wistfully about living on copyrights. That was what they had been doing. That was why Smith had married her—for the copyrights of To Live like the Jackal and The Fanatics. I got a frisson, perhaps my first intimation that I was dealing with something other than an intellectual game, from the title of Steen’s big money-spinner. In the book it had been von Lettow-Vorbek who was the lion and Steen himself the attendant scavenger; but now I saw that I could cast Steen as the great predator, his books as his prey, and those who subsequently lived squabbling on their proceeds as the jackals. Yes, wasn’t there something in one of Dobbs’s letters to me about money no longer coming in from the trust after the war. That must have been because Smith had by then married Annette, and taken over the income from royalties. And …

  I had something for Dobbs! I knew why Steen had set up that peculiar trust, with its uncharacteristic secretiveness! What had Smith said? ‘All he could do was take his revenge in his own way, though few would have recognised it as such. Very effective it turned out to be.’ The trust was no act of generosity, let alone of forgiveness. It was a way of binding Molly and Daisy to each other in mutual parasitism. I shivered at the thought, much as I had some forty years ago as the frost fingered in through the smashed panes of Lord Orne’s conservatory. How extraordinary it was to think that I had gone back there the very next Sunday and found a tarpaulin over the holes, and that by the end of that term Molly had caused the glass to be found (curved panes, in wartime!) and we were all behaving as though it had never happened.

  Or was it so extraordinary? I mean, did it really happen like that by accident? Isn’t it more likely that there was, effectively, a kind of conspiracy with Molly at its centre, whereby all concerned deliberately behaved as though that evening had never occurred? At least nothing was done to prevent me continuing to go down to Molly’s teas until the end of next summer term, when I left. I don’t think Daisy went ‘mad’ again. I don’t even remember feeling apprehensive that she might.

  Nor, of course, do I remember the slightest indication that Annette and the Captain might end up married. He continued to tutor me, she to teach Freshers, which meant I saw very little of her up at the school, and I don’t think he came down to the conservatory again, so I would seldom have seen them together …

  My mind gave up the effort at recollection and slithered to a different sort of strangeness, if you can call Mrs Smith’s straightforward pleasant ordinariness by that name. Was it thinkable that she had been begotten under the circumstances Smith had described to me? Ought not such parents, such a conjunction, to have produced, if not a monster, at least some hint of the bizarre? Of course Daisy was promiscuous, Smith had said. Steen didn’t need to be the father, only to believe he was. Or perhaps not even that. For the sake of his revenge his fatherhood could be considered a handy fiction. Perhaps Mrs Smith’s real father was one of those maimed soldiers, able in spite of his deformities to pass on good sound genes.

  Up through this speculation, released perhaps by my stirring around in the pool of memory a few minutes before as I thought of the broken panes in the conservatory, floated the thought I had been trying to embody half an hour ago, the other parallel that verified Smith’s story. It was between Daisy becoming violent in the studio in the rue de l’Université and her doing the same that night at Paddery. As I stared at the two mental images side by side I saw that the resemblance went deeper than the surface. They both had been put-up jobs. They both, even, had involved Molly pouring out drinks which were not what they appeared. Molly had arranged for Daisy to go mad, that particular night and none other.

  I was actually turning into my driveway when a whole new set of possibilities struck me. Not new facts, but rearrangements of the mixture of facts and what I had taken t
o be fictions, which I had thought of as my novel. In this new alignment the whole bang shoot was true. Not ‘true’. True.

  I had a cup of tea and then settled down and wrote to Dobbs. I hadn’t been keeping carbons of my letters to him, but this time, in case he wanted to refer to some detail, I did. The account of my interview with Smith, as printed in the previous chapter, is taken from this carbon, with only two or three later interpolations about my own reactions. For completeness, and because of a couple of things she said, I included my talk with Mrs Smith. I had supper at my desk. It was twenty past twelve when I finished, well after my normal bedtime, but there was no question of being able to go away and sleep.

  All the time I had been writing—stimulated, indeed, by the familiar process—my idea about the death of Christopher Wither had continued to grow, to make connections, to become a complex life threshing around like a child in the womb. To quiet it I needed not only to get it down on paper but to communicate it to someone. There was no other possible audience than poor Dobbs. I would have to write him a second letter. But though I had the excuse that a small part of the structure—that concerned with the trust set up for Annette—was relevant to a life of Steen, it did not seem fair to lumber a sick man with another great dollop of reading when what I had already written for him was difficult enough to cope with. All the same I had to get the stuff not merely written but posted, so I resolved on what may seem a childish stratagem. Our post is collected at 9.15 a.m.; I would catch that with my first letter, putting a first-class stamp on it; then, as soon as the van was gone I would post my second letter, second-class. Thus I would get them off my chest almost simultaneously and Dobbs would receive them at least a couple of days apart.

  Dear Dobbs,

  I’m extremely sorry to burden you with a second great screed. Really I’m only writing it in order to get to sleep, and very likely shan’t send it. If I do, please feel free to treat it as the next batch of light hospital reading’. There won’t be any more of the novel. That’s over, done with, impossible. But if you want you can regard this as the final instalment, where the detective unravels the apparent tangle that has gone before. Except that he doesn’t …