Festering Lilies (12 page)

Bearing in mind the vastness and difficulty of the task she had taken on and thinking that at least in such social contacts she might have some slight advantage over the police, Willow grudgingly agreed to accompany her lover to celebrate his ex-girlfriend's engagement.

Three-quarters of an hour later, late and a little damp but glamorous enough to be easily forgiven, they arrived at the party. The receiving line had long-since been broken up, rather to Willow's relief, but Sarah's much older brother was posted near the door to greet any late arrivals. Richard introduced him to Willow and with a stagily lecherous glance at her new black dress and long legs he sent Richard straight off to find drinks.

‘Poor old Cress,' said Anthony Gnatche, ‘just the same.'

‘I've never heard him called that before,' said Willow coldly. She had disliked him from the moment of hearing his braying voice and decoding his tie and blazer buttons (which belonged to one of the smarter regiments), but she was determined to pump him for any information she could get out of him.

‘We called him that at our prep school. The theory was that he was just like the kind of creeping green stuff that could be found growing on someone's slimy flannel on the window sill.' The rather handsome man's self-satisfied laugh put the finishing touches to Willow's dislike of him. She might occasionally find Richard irritatingly pompous, might even moan about his astonishing lack of ordinary practical skills, but she unreservedly admired his intelligence, and he was extremely kind to her. She certainly was not prepared to accept criticism from an upper-crust lout like this one, who obviously valued brawn miles above brain. With her face hardening into that of the assistant secretary (finance) of DOAP, she was planning to rout him with a brilliantly sarcastic comment when she realised that he had given her precisely the opening she needed.

‘Oh, so you must have been at school with that poor murdered politician too. Do you remember him?' she said instead.

‘Algy Endelsham? Yes, of course I remember him. We've been friends really ever since. Luckily I never got across him as people like poor old Cress used to. I suppose being pretty good at games helped, what? But d'you know, if old Algy were going to be bumped orf, I'd have thought it would have been his brother who'd have done it,' said Gnatche pressing his calves backwards and thrusting his manly chest towards Willow.

‘I didn't know he had ever had a brother,' said Willow, mentally waking up. ‘What happened to him?'

‘God knows. Pathetic character, really,' answered Gnatche. ‘Ah, Richard, great. Here, Miss Woodruffe, Cress has managed to find you some fizz. Buzz off there's a good chap; go and play.'

Richard laughed:

‘You know, Anthony,' he said with an arrogance which Willow could only envy in the particular circumstances, ‘it's lucky that you're never going to have to earn your own living. The real world is just that tiniest bit different from prep school life. All right if I leave you, Cressida?' he added, turning to Willow. With his back to Anthony Gnatche, he gave her such a broad wink that she could hardly refrain from laughing.

‘Fine, Richard,' she said as drily as she could. ‘Anthony is telling me all about the poor murdered minister during his schooldays, Richard,' she added brightly.

‘Ah, thrilling for you,' he answered over his shoulder as he walked away.

‘Now, where were we?' murmured Gnatche, drinking from the glass Richard had brought him. ‘Algy's brother, yes. He'd have been all right, I suppose, if he'd been the younger. But there he was, Endelsham Ma., but lower down the school than Endelsham Mi., never in any of the teams, butter fingered, tone deaf and mocked for singing out of tune in chapel, dead loss really. Bogged his bags, too. Funny, I've never thought of him from that day to this.'

Conscious of a desire to whip out a tape recorder to collect the man's objectionable reminiscences so that she did not actually have to listen to them, Willow did not answer. Instead she took a sip of the ‘Champagne'she had been given and had to exercise all her diplomacy and good manners not to screw up her face in disgust. It was, she thought, extraordinary that anyone should go to the trouble of having a party in such a place and then choose to serve sweet, cloying sparkling wine of the most blatant sort. He must have bought it himself, too, for the House of Lords catering people could never have chosen such stuff. A fat waitress passed just then with a heavy silver-plated tray of aspic-covered savouries. Willow, who usually detested such things, reached out for a couple and stuffed them into her mouth to take away the taste of the wine.

Anthony Gnatche, tall, dark, rich and county, had been accustomed from his late teens to finding any woman to whom he spoke so flattered by his attentions that she tried at once to elicit compliments and invitations from him. He was therefore extremely surprised that this woman did not even bother to answer what he had said and, worse, that her eyes were searching the crowd behind him.

‘But that's all bloody dull, Cressida – if I may,' he said, expecting a better response and patting her shoulder. The pat if not the words drew her attention back to him.

‘What?' she said vaguely. ‘Oh, yes, do call me Cressida. I…'

‘I wish I could take you out for some dinner later, but I'm stuck with my mother and sisters,' he said, trying harder than ever to evoke the usual reactions in the tall red-head in front of him. ‘But perhaps some other night?'

‘What?' she said again and then remembered where she was. ‘Oh, it's sweet of you. Yes, perhaps. But I'd better wander off now; I mustn't monopolise you.'

Since that was an excuse Gnatche himself had often used to get away from the fat, the dull, the spotty, the poor, the provincial, the noisy and the too-obviously clever girls he had been landed with at parties, he was left in considerable discomfort. But it was not long before he had refurbished his self-esteem by realising that despite her glossy finish she must be a good thirty-five at least and, stuck with poor old Cress, obviously at her last gasp sexually speaking.

Willow, quite unaware that she had challenged his masculinity, dented his self-image or been anything other than perfectly polite was meanwhile congratulating herself on the fact that she no longer detested parties full of people she did not know. It would have been hard to pinpoint the moment at which such occasions had ceased to be ordeals and had become instead opportunities for a little discreet publicising of her books and for the collecting of useful copy, but it had undoubtedly coincided with her making real money.

Whenever the moment, it had given her ample confidence, and she used her newish social skills now to trawl the party for bits and pieces of gossip about the minister. She also collected innumerable compliments for herself. Some of them pleased her for the niceness with which they were delivered or the wit with which they were phrased (the witty ones were usually produced by men of at least sixty). But in the end they began to bore her, because they seemed as unreal as the person she was pretending to be. Determined not to drink any more of the disgusting wine and over-f of the damp and salty bits and pieces she had been offered to eat, she started to look for Richard to take her home at about half-past eight.

A gentle touch on her black velvet sleeve made her turn round and she found herself looking down into a sweet pink-and-white face surrounded with fine fair hair crowned with a velvet hairband. Amused that the uniform for ‘nice young girls'did not seem to have changed in the last twenty years, Willow smiled encouragingly.

‘I say,' said the blond child, who must have been about eighteen, ‘aren't you Cressida Woodruffe? I absolutely adore your books and I recognised you from that smashing photograph on the jackets.'

‘Yes, I am. How kind of you,' answered Willow, looking more carefully at her and noticing that the dark-green silk dress the child wore was much too old for her but added a certain style to her predictable prettiness. ‘Who are you?'

‘Oh I'm Emma… Gnatche,' came the answer and Willow thought immediately, yes, naturally you're Emma. A creature who looks like you could not be called anything else. Then she came to her senses just as the child went on: ‘You know, Sarah's sister. Can I get someone to fetch a drink for you?'

‘No, thank you,' said Willow, shaking her red hair. ‘I was really looking for Richard Crescent, who's going to take me out to dinner.'

‘Oh, I saw him a minute ago, kissing Sarah good bye.' The girl put a hand up over her mouth and her eyes, huge and blue, looked at Willow in terror. ‘I am sorry. I mean, they weren't…'

‘Don't worry, Emma. Richard and I are old friends,' said Willow.

‘I am sorry,' said Emma again when she was sure that Willow was really not upset by her tactless revelation. ‘It's only that I'm in such a state about poor Algy that… I mean, I'm not usually this ill-mannered or scatty.'

‘Algy?' repeated Willow, delighted to have stumbled on yet another opening.

‘Yes, Algernon Endelsham, you know the minister who's just been… killed.' The big eyes were glossy with unshed tears and Willow found even her stony heart a little wrung with pity.

‘Why don't we go and sit on that sofa over there, and you can tell me all about it,' she said quite gently. They went, and out it all came. Emma had worked for Algy briefly during her last summer holidays from school, when she had been trying to decide whether she wanted to be a House of Commons secretary.

Hearing that, Willow spared a thought for the silent bitterness she would once have felt at the unfair, unearned and invaluable privileges given to girls like this one. Daughters of successful – or merely well-known – parents, they were able to swan into jobs in whatever field they chose: Members of Parliament would give them holiday jobs, publishers would take them on despite their total lack of experience – or often brains – auction houses would train them, interior decorators, art galleries and sundry other furnishers of the playgrounds of the rich would snap them up for the desirable effects of their voices on the telephone, irrespective of whether they could type, do accounts, or recognise a Leonardo da Vinci from a David Hockney, while daughters of the merely hardworking, like Willow herself, had to work and struggle for anything they achieved.

But the days of bitter jealousy – heavily suppressed though it had always been – were long over for Willow, and by then she was able to admit to herself that girls like Emma Gnatche could also be charming, well-mannered, sometimes clever, hard-working and as thoroughly deserving of their good fortune as she considered herself to be.

Richard materialised in front of their sofa before Willow could ask any questions of the girl beside her and so instead she said:

‘Here's Richard, so I'll have to go, but I'd love to have a proper talk with you. Are you in London this weekend?'

‘Yes,' said Emma obviously finding herself very daring. ‘We might have lunch or something.… I mean, if you wanted to.'

‘Why not?' answered Willow, smiling again. ‘Look, what about the Café des Amis in Covent Garden. Do you know it?' Emma nodded her sleek blond head. ‘All right then; twelve o'clock, so that we miss the worst of the crowds?'

‘Gosh, super. Thanks. I'll be there,' said Emma, blushing and casting a distracted look at Richard before escaping.

‘What on earth are you up to?' Richard asked; watching Willow watching Emma.

‘What? Oh, she worked for Algy last summer. As you say, his goings-on at prep school aren't likely to cast much light on what happened to him this November, but last August is a different matter.'

‘Be careful, Willow. I'm not sure I like the idea of your…'

‘My what, Richard? If you're implying that I'll damage that child, you damn well ought to know me better.' He did not speak, and she tossed her red head at him as he ushered her out of the room.

‘Where would you like to eat, Willow?' he asked a little later as they were sitting side by side in his luxurious car.

‘Honestly, Richard, I'm not particularly hungry – especially after that dreary party. I ate such a lot of bits and pieces. I'd rather just go home. And I must do some work. I'm horribly behind. Could you just drop me off in Chesham Place?'

‘Don't you want to hear about Algy's beastliness at school then?' asked Richard.

Willow turned her head and gave him a brilliant smile.

‘I've decided that you're right that it can't be relevant, dear Richard,' she said. ‘But I am a bit intrigued to know about his brother. That frightful Gnatche told me a little about him this evening. Did you know him too?'

‘Not well; but I do remember that he suffered even more than the rest of us from Algy's dictator-complex.'

‘Did they look alike?' Willow asked as the red lights in front of them forced Richard to brake. He looked at her and sighed. ‘What's the matter?' she asked, bringing him back to his senses.

‘Nothing really. I'd just hoped we could return to the bath and carry on where we left off. Never mind. Your work must come first.'

Detecting a certain sarcasm in that sententious comment, Willow did not deign to answer.

‘As far as I can remember,' said Richard, apparently giving up hope of persuading her to change her mind, ‘the brother was a nondescript little squirt – not as tall as Algy then, although he was older, but… Oh heavens, Willow, it's more than a quarter of a century since I left, I can't remember and it wouldn't do you any good even if I could – no man's going to look the same at forty as he did at thirteen.'

‘There's no need to be so cross,' she said, genuinely surprised at his tone. ‘I was merely curious. Ah, good, here we are. You're sweet to have brought me home, Richard. Good night. Sleep well.'

‘I'll be lucky,' he murmured under his breath and then added more loudly, ‘It was fun, Willow. May I see you tomorrow?'