An April Shroud (14 page)

'You drinking?' he asked, glancing at the almost empty brandy balloon which stood on the window sill. 'Well, sup up and try this.'

'You're
still
here,' stated Fielding with a scornful surprise. But he took the drink.

'Aye,' said Dalziel. 'I only start enjoying parties when I've outstayed my welcome.'

'I'm sorry. I had no right to be rude,' said Fielding, suddenly contrite.

'Don't apologize for Christ's sake,' said Dalziel. 'Once you start that game, you never can stop. I've no right to tell you to take this sodding money, but I'm going to. Why don't you want it?'

'It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing,' protested Fielding, raising his voice so that the others could hear him. 'All these people can talk about is
Westminster Bridge
which I published in 1938. They seem to imagine I've written nothing since then.'

'Keep your voice down,' said Dalziel grimly. 'All you want to worry about writing now is cheques. Don't give me this point of principle crap. What's the matter with the money?'

Hereward Fielding glared at him with an air of indignation approaching the apoplectic. Dalziel began to feel that his excursion into diplomacy was going to be as unsuccessful as it had been uncharacteristic. But now the old man's face paled to a less hectic hue and he said in a low conversational tone, 'Money's not everything.'

Dalziel sensed that this banal assertion was not a mere continuation of the hurt pride debate.

'A thousand quid's two hundred bottles of good brandy,' he said reasonably. 'That's a lot of drinking.'

'Which needs a lot of time,' mused Fielding. 'It's your considered opinion, is it, Dalziel, that I would have this time?'

It was an odd question, but Dalziel took it in his stride.

'I can't guarantee it,' he said. 'But it's worth a try.'

'Mr Fielding, sir,' murmured a low, flat, American voice.

One of the Americans had approached with an expression of deferential determination, like an undertaker who is not going to let you buy pine.

'Sir,' he said, 'let me assure you that the Gumbelow Foundation is aware of and wishes to honour the totality of your achievement. My colleague, Mr Flower, mentioned
Westminster Bridge
merely as a volume of radical interest to the student of your mature work. Volumes such as
Victory Again, Indian Summer
and
A Kiss on the Other Cheek
are, of course, equally well known to us and equally admired also. It would be a grave disappointment . . .'

'Oh come on,' snapped Fielding impatiently. 'Let's get on with it.'

Long-winded the American may have been, but he could move at great speed when the circumstances demanded. Fielding was led to an armchair by a low table on which copies of what Dalziel presumed to be his books were strewn. There were five or six, about the size and thickness of police promotion manuals. The photographer, who answered to Nikki (the spelling formed itself unbidden in Dalziel's mind), took a stream of pictures not seeming to care much who she got in the frame. Her camera appeared to require as little reloading as one of those guns the good cowboys used to have in the pre-psychological westerns. The tape-recorder was switched on and the Negro placed a microphone on the table and invited Fielding to say a few words.

'Must we have this sodding thing cluttering up the place?' he demanded. He referred to the microphone, but each of the visitors looked perturbed for a moment.

'We'd like to get the moment permanently recorded for posterity,' said the second spaghetti man.

'Who are you?'

'I'm Alex Penitent, BBC. I shall be interviewing you after the presentation.'

'Shall you? We'll see.'

'Gentlemen, gentlemen, may we commence?' said the American. 'Mr Flower.'

'Thank you, Mr Bergmann.'

Flower sat on a hard chair opposite Fielding while Bergmann stood alongside his colleague and put one hand inside his jacket. They looked as if they were about to make the old man an offer he couldn't refuse.

'Gentlemen, gentlemen,' said Bergmann. 'Right, Mr Flower.'

Flower began to speak in the deep vibrant tones of the travelogue commentator.

'For fifty years and more the Gumbelow Foundation of America has been seeking out and acknowledging rare examples of merit in the Arts. The Gumbelow Foundation does not make annual awards, for so high is the standard set that in some years no work attains this standard. Past recipients of awards have included . . .'

Here followed a list which might have been an extract from a telephone directory to Dalziel except that it contained the name of a British artist whose talents had burgeoned during a gaol sentence for armed robbery. Dalziel did not know him through his paintings but through the more personal contact of having kneed him in the crutch when he resisted arrest. As far as he could make out, the Gumbelow Foundation had not given any money to a policeman.

Flower proceeded with his potted history of the Foundation and after a while Dalziel was pleased to note most of the others were beginning to look as impatient as he felt. Someone squeezed his arm. It was Bonnie who smiled at him and mouthed 'Thanks.'

Fielding brought matters to a head by turning away from the table and waving his empty glass at Tillotson who nodded understandingly, came forward with a bottle and tripped over the microphone wire.

When the confusion had been sorted out, Flower looked enquiringly at the tape-recorder man and said, 'Shall I start again?'

'Oh no, oh no,' cried the Negro. 'We can tidy it up. Oh yes.'

Flower seemed to sense the mood of the gathering for the first time and when he resumed his speech, his voice rose half an octave and accelerated by about fifty words a minute.

'In conclusion,' he concluded, 'may I say that few occasions have given me personally greater pleasure than this meeting with you, Hereward Fielding. On behalf of the Gumbelow Foundation of America, I ask you to accept this award for services to literature. It comes with the admiration, awe and sincere respect of lovers of beauty the whole world over.'

He held up his left hand. Bergmann withdrew his right from inside his jacket and slapped a large white envelope into Flower's palm. The envelope was then thrust aggressively towards Fielding and Nikki's camera began clicking like a Geiger-counter in a uranium mine.

'Keep it there, keep it there, good, good, super, super,' she said. Flower held the pose, smiling fixedly at Fielding who, it gradually began to dawn on the spectators, was staring at the outstretched hand as if it were holding a dead rat. Even Nikki eventually became aware that all was not quite right and the clickings became intermittent, finally dying away into a silence which for a moment was complete.

'Oh Herrie!' breathed Bonnie.

The old man spoke. His voice was light, meditative.

'It is interesting to me that you only make your awards in those years which see the production of work of rare merit, particularly as I have published nothing for more than five years now. Still, better late than never, they say. Though I am not sure I agree with that either. I have been writing for over fifty years now and half a century is very late indeed. I am, of course - I
have
to be I suppose - grateful for your offer. But fifty years . . . !'

He shook his head and sighed.

'If you'd given me this when I was twenty, I might have bought myself a big meal, a floppy hat like Roy Campbell's and one of those delicious little tarts who used to hang around the Cafe Royal.

'If you'd given it to me when I was thirty, I might have bought my kids some new clothes and my wife a sunnier disposition.

'Even if you had given it to me when I was forty or fifty. I'd have found a use for it. A more comfortable car, for instance. Or a cruise round the Greek islands to see the cradle of civilization.

'But now I am old and I am ill. I have little appetite for food or women. My children have grown up and gone their ways. Or died. I no longer care to travel by car. And civilization is dying where it began.

'So you might say that in a fashion not untypically American you have come too bloody late.'

He paused. No one spoke. The envelope remained in Flower's outstretched hand. The American's expression never deviated from respectful admiration, and the expressions of the others varied from amusement via distaste and indifference to Bonnie's evident anxiety.

'Bravo.'

It was Bertie who broke the silence, uttering the word with overstressed irony.

'Shut it, Bertie,' said Mavis warningly.

Bergmann shrugged, a massive Central European bewildered shrug which crumbled his streamlined New York facade as an earth tremor might destroy a sky-scraper. Flower seemed to take a cue and relaxed in his chair dropping his hand to the table. The old man's arm shot out as the envelope moved and he pulled it rudely from Flower's grasp.

'However,' he said, very Churchillian, 'I will not refuse your gift, late though it is. For I recall that I never did get a hat like Roy Campbell's. But now I shall. And I shall wear it slightly askew as I walk through the village in the hope that the tedious inmates will shun me as a man unbalanced and in the even vainer hope that this reputation might somehow distress my neglectful friends and ungrateful descendants. Bonnie, my glass is empty.'

After that somehow a party began. The BBC man tried for a while to get his intimate interview but in the end recognized that his efforts were losing him ground in the drinks race and set about catching up. The feature writer, aptly named Butt, was well in the lead, though Bergmann would have been neck and neck if his new flamboyancy of gesture had not been joined by a matching volubility of speech. Flower on the other hand was a recidivist and his speech got lower and slower and more and more slurred till he sounded like a second-rate English mimic doing James Stewart. Nikki had stopped clicking and was gurgling merrily through glass after nauseating glass of port and brandy. Even Arkwright, the tape-recorder man, found time from his task of preventing others resting their glasses and persons on his equipment to down mouthfuls from a half-pint glass of gin.

Nor were the residents of Lake House far behind and Dalziel, ever a pragmatist, put all care for the past or the future out of his mind and set to with a will.

After a while for a relatively small gathering the noise became deafening. He found himself next to Fielding who was still holding the envelope tight to his chest as though fearing it would be taken from him. His words to Dalziel seemed to confirm this impression.

'It will be all right, you assure me of that?' he cried in what was relatively a whisper.

Dalziel nodded wisely, winked and turned away in search of Bonnie. Behind him the conversation between Fielding and the Americans resumed.

'I don't care for Updike. Overwrought, overblown and overpraised,' cried Bergmann.

'Yeah,' drawled Flower. 'Updike's a shit.'

Bonnie was in the window bay being leaned over confidentially by Butt who seemed to fancy himself as the great poke as well as the great soak, but Dalziel's rescue mission was hindered by Penitent who grasped him by the arm, peered closely into his face and said something like, 'What are you doing after the show?'

'What?' bellowed Dalziel.

'Haven't we met somewhere before?'

His voice had the controlled flatness with which ambitious public school men in the BBC attempted to conceal their origins.

'I doubt it,' said Dalziel.

Someone grasped his other arm and he felt a surge of panic as if at any moment blows might be hurled at his unprotected gut.

It was Bertie. There was no physical danger but he was bent on being nasty.

'Enjoying yourself, Dalziel?' he asked. 'Enjoying your free booze, are you? And your bed and breakfast? Pity you'll have to be leaving us.'

'What's up, sonny?' snarled Dalziel. 'You putting me out?'

'No, no. It's just that once your car's ready, you'll be on your way, won't you? Well, I rang the garage after lunch and they say they've got it and it'll be ready for you in the morning. At a pinch, you could go tonight. Not that we want to lose you, of course.'

'Mensa!' said Penitent.

'What?'

'That's where we met, I think. Mensa.'

Ensa, thought Dalziel. He thinks I'm a sort of performer. Which I am.

'Not likely,' he bellowed. 'Nearest I got was seeing Tommy Handley at Catterick when I was in the MPs.'

'I'll say cheerio now in case we miss each other in the morning,' said Bertie. Dalziel shook his arm free and succeeded in slopping some of his drink over the youth's shirt which was some consolation for not being able to punch his fat, smiling mouth.

'MPs,' said Penitent, puzzled. 'Did Handley have something in the Eden administration?'

Dalziel smiled at him uncomprehendingly.

'You work at it, lad,' he said in a sympathetic voice. 'You can end up having as many "O" levels as Jimmy Young.'

'Charley!' He heard Bonnie's voice cut clearly through the din. 'We need some more booze. Pop along to the store and bring up a couple of bottles of everything, there's a love. Oh, and while you're down there, tell Mrs Greave I'd like a word. I suppose everyone will want to be fed eventually.'

She seemed quite unperturbed by the prospect. Dalziel recalled that his own wife had required five days' notice if he was bringing a mate round for a glass of beer.

There was a click in his ear and he thought that Nikki must have started up again but when he looked it was Uniff.

'One not enough?' he asked, nodding towards the green tunic which he now spotted alongside Louisa by the door.

'Her?' said Uniff scornfully. 'She's one of the creative accident mob. You shoot enough film, something's bound to be OK.'

'While you use your genius?'

'Right,' grinned Uniff. 'Besides I'm not so rich. Like big John Wayne says, you gotta make every shot count.'

'How's your picture going?' asked Dalziel.

'Up and down, you know how it is, man. You want to see it sometime?'

'If you want to show it,' said Dalziel.