Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (14 page)

The authorities at Majestic decided that the week at Brighton should be cancelled. This did not satisfy Sir Roger Carlton who rang the theatre several times, demanding to speak to anyone in charge, and asking to know why we could not go on with the understudies? The fact was Talbot’s and Adela’s understudies, who were themselves playing small parts in the play, were very inadequately prepared, and the understudies to the understudies who would have to go on for
them
—they included Rebecca—were not at all prepared; moreover, there was now no director. Sir Roger refused to understand. Eventually the company manager grew tired of fielding his calls, and made me speak to him.

After listening to his protests and arguments for a while I suggested to Sir Roger that he come down and see for himself.

‘I can’t! I can’t! I’m tied up with important business here. I’m not well.’

Sir Roger vented his anger against Talbot and Adela for what he called their ‘idiotic behaviour’, and when he started to talk about Cudworth I could hear him choke with rage. ‘That stupid pouff!’ he kept saying. I listened patiently until I was rewarded with calmer moments.

‘I suppose you’re all coming back to London today? Well, when you do, I want you to come and see me.’

‘It might be very late.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how late. I’ll still be up. Come anyway.’ He gave me his address in Onslow Gardens and instructions on how to find it.

I told Sophie that I had agreed to see Sir Roger that night and asked her to come with me.

‘Oh, God! Why?’

‘Because I can’t do it without you.’

‘All right.’

What with one thing and another, it was close to midnight when we arrived at Sir Roger’s house in Onslow Gardens. I had rung him up to ask if he still wanted to see us, and he was more anxious than ever, offering to pay for our taxi fare.

There was a long wait after we had rung the front door bell. Eventually we heard a slow shuffle of footsteps and the door was opened by a small, very old woman in slippers, with a pink crocheted shawl around her shoulders.

‘Roger is expecting you,’ she said in a withered voice. ‘I’m his mother.’

She pointed up the stairs and then shuffled off without another word into her own domain on the ground floor.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Sophie as we climbed the staircase. ‘Lives with his mother! At his age! And
she
must be older than God!’

I put my finger to my lips and we giggled. The house was dimly lit and opulent. The walls were thick with paintings. Sir Roger was a collector of Pre-Raphaelites. Their jewel colours glowed sullenly in the subdued illumination. We felt oppressed.

As we reached the first floor landing a piece of music which was familiar to us began to play. It was Johann Strauss’s
Kaiser-Walzer
which had been the theme tune of
The Last of Lady Ashbrook
: the slow, lazily majestic sound of grandees taking their pleasure in candlelit ballrooms or on starlit terraces.

‘He must be in there,’ said Sophie. She pointed to the open door from which the sound emanated.

We entered a big, high-ceilinged room, lit only by a table lamp which cast giant shadows across an interior rich in books and pictures. Heavy plum-coloured brocade curtains covered the windows, stretching almost from floor to ceiling. On the wall opposite hung a huge Burne-Jones painting, depicting the legend of Andromeda. A slender, naked, prepubescent Andromeda, was chained to a rock. Above her reared the vast coiled sea-monster, its brutal saurian head feasting on her charms with bulging eyes. Around these two churned the sea, almost as sinuous and threatening as the monster itself. The rescuing Perseus was nowhere to be seen, not even as a speck on the clouded horizon.

Beside the lamp in a winged armchair sat Sir Roger Carlton, a tartan blanket on his knees. The pale, flabby skin of his face was moist with sweat. On the table under the lamp was an assortment of items to minister to his ailments and needs: pill bottles, handkerchiefs, water, glasses, a whisky bottle, the telephone and a little cassette tape recorder which was still playing the waltz.

Sir Roger snapped off the tape. He smiled thinly at Sophie, and his eyes were angry.

‘I had a visit from the police this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Was that anything to do with either of you?’ His glance flicked angrily from me to Sophie, then back again. Our baffled expressions must have told him that it wasn’t. ‘They obviously didn’t know who I was. I put through a few phone calls to the appropriate people and the constabulary departed with a flea in its ear. They seemed to be under the misapprehension that I was in possession of pornography, pictures of underage girls or something. Some malicious person must have tipped them off. Well, if it wasn’t you—and I didn’t seriously think it was—it must have been Billie—’ Hurriedly, he corrected himself. ‘—I don’t mean Billie herself, obviously, I mean that desiccated old bitch of a housekeeper she used to have; Bridie, or whatever her name was.’

There was a slight bumping noise from the ceiling above. Sir Roger looked up nervously. His hand hovered over the button of his cassette player but he did not turn it on. Instead he asked us for a full account of the previous day’s events which we gave to him. He then discussed with us at interminable length the possibilities of reviving the play. Every time the conversation flagged and we tried to make a move to go, he would ask us another question, or put forward another idea. He had waved us to a seat, but he had not offered us any refreshment. From time to time his eyes would flicker apprehensively up to the shadowed ceiling. Eventually I glanced at my watch and was astonished to find that it was four in the morning. I looked at Sophie and began to say: ‘We really must—’

‘It’s the ingratitude, I can’t stand,’ said Sir Roger, cutting into my words aggressively. ‘I wrote that play for her, you know. Billie. And was she grateful? She never even tried to make an effort. She messed up her lines. She did her best to ruin the whole thing. I don’t know why I bothered. Billie never really liked me, you know. I was too clever for her; I had escaped her orbit. She couldn’t bear any man that she couldn’t control, you see. Everything had to revolve around her. It was all Billie, Billie, Billie.’

There was a thump on the ceiling, followed by another, then another. Then the bumps seemed to form themselves into a rhythmical pattern, as if they were the steps of giant feet. The whole room began to quiver and vibrate. The shadows cast by the table lamp seemed to be moving too, revolving around the walls. I took Sophie’s hand and we got up.

‘Don’t go!’ screamed Sir Roger. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t go!’

He turned on his cassette recorder to drown out the thumping, but it only increased in rhythm and pace. He turned up the volume to full but the noise and vibration of moving feet seemed only enhanced by the strains of the
Emperor Waltz
. With all this there came the heady vanilla scent of
Ambre Antique
. There was no mistaking her, the Dancer in the Dark.

***

It was a cold grey dawn as we came out of the house in Onslow Gardens with the heavy Viennese accents of the
Emperor Waltz
still ringing in our ears. We walked for a while without speaking in the still, empty streets. After a while our feet clicked into step with each other.

Eventually I said, ‘He of all people doesn’t deserve to survive.’

‘Look at it this way,’ said Sophie, ‘he’s condemned to survive. Poor old Stinky!’ She paused, and then added: ‘There’s something about that
Emperor Waltz
I never liked. It’s like eating too much chocolate. Are you going to go on acting after all this?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘The theatre is a fantastic lover, but a bloody awful husband. What will you do instead for a living?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest,’

‘You’ll live.’

‘I hope so.’

There was a pause and then, simultaneously, as if on cue, we both began to laugh.

MR PIGSNY

I

It was, I suppose, a typical gangster’s funeral. There were the extravagantly insincere floral tributes: TO REG, A DIAMOND GEEZER in white carnations; there was ‘My Way’ played by the reluctant organist; there was the coffin borne by six burly, black-coated thugs into a church which Reg would never have entered in his lifetime except to marry or to bury.

And why was I, Housman Professor of Classical Epigraphy at Cambridge University, there? Well, my sister, in some unaccountable hour of rebellious madness, had once married the late Reg McCall’s younger brother Den and borne him two sons, before finally divorcing him and marrying a Merchant Banker instead. Because my sister Gwen ‘simply could not face’ the funeral, and it was still the vacation, I had been deputised to accompany my two teenage nephews Robert and Arthur to the obsequies. Reg had no living children. His daughter Janet had predeceased him in a dreadful drug-fuelled car crash some years previously, so Robert and Arthur were possible heirs. It would have shown ‘disrespect’, that great gangland sin, had they not been present at their Uncle’s interment.

To be honest, on the few occasions I had met Reg, I had rather liked him. Certainly, I always preferred him to Den, a ‘cold fish’ if ever there was one. Of course I knew that Reg had been a ruthless underworld tyrant of the old school. I knew that he had had people ‘slapped’, the criminal’s euphemism for beaten up, and even ‘cut’ (knifed) for betraying him. I knew that he had run protection rackets and brothels, and masterminded bank raids, and that he had once personally killed a man. The victim’s name apparently was Maltese Percy, and the deed had been done in the cellars of the Dog and Gibbet in Hoxton. Everyone knew it had happened, but there were, of course, no witnesses. I had also discovered that his proud boast that he never had anything to do with drug dealing was a lie, given out for the benefit of journalists, eager to perpetuate the myth of the loveable rogue. Nevertheless, I had liked him.

Because our paths would never have crossed other than for family reasons, Reg and I could take a dispassionate interest in one another. I heard that Reg used to boast about me to his cronies—‘my brother-in-law, you know, the Cambridge Professor’—and I must admit that I have occasionally dined out at high tables on
him
. At family gatherings Reg was a lavish and attentive host with the kind of courtesy, when he had a mind to it, that had earned him the sentimental East End reputation of being ‘a real gentleman’. In my experience real gentlemen don’t have people cut or slapped, and rarely kill petty criminals in pub cellars, but let that pass. He was genial and friendly towards me, unlike his brother Den, ‘the quiet one’, the backstairs fixer of the outfit, who always gave the impression of harbouring a grudge against the world.

I had been hoping, rather unrealistically perhaps, that once we had seen the body safely interred in the little Essex churchyard, my nephews and I could slip away. But of course, it was not to be; we were ‘asked back to the house’ and it would have been disrespectful to refuse. We were even offered a lift in Reg’s widow’s stretch limousine because we had arrived at the church by train and taxi.

Even before we entered the limousine, I sensed an atmosphere. Den was already there, and Reg’s widow Maureen was tucked into a corner. She was a small, neat woman who had retained her figure and her striking blonde hair with a strenuousness that showed in her face. Though she was barely in her mid-fifties, it looked ten years older, withered and pinched by anxiety. She glared at us from her corner while Den explained the situation briskly to her.

‘Larry here and the boys are coming up to the house with us. All right Maureen?’ That last question expected no reply and got none. (My name incidentally is
not
Larry and never has been: it is Lawrence, Professor Lawrence Chibnall.)

I knew the reason for the atmosphere and could, to some extent, sympathise with her. Now that Reg was dead, from natural causes incidentally, what little importance Maureen possessed in the McCall family hierarchy would dwindle to nothing. Den had already assumed a greater measure of control over the firm after Reg’s first stroke eighteen months before; now the take-over was complete. Maureen would be comfortably off, but she would be ignored. Had she had sons as Den had, the role of matriarch might still be hers.

My nephews Robert and Arthur were behaving well. They did their best to ignore Maureen’s resentful tearstained stare and talked quietly to each other about neutral subjects. They were both at good public schools. Though they had been taught by their mother to hate Den they had the sense never to show any hostility. I was amused to learn from them that the fact that their father was a notorious underworld figure was regarded as ‘cool’ by their school fellows and they were more than happy to take advantage of the fact.

Just before we set off for the house, someone else joined us in the limousine. Though there was plenty of room Den tried to prevent it on the spurious grounds that the car was reserved for close family only, but Maureen, for once asserted herself.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s Mr Pigsny.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘He was very close to Reg when he was dying. Let him in, Den.’

The man who clambered aboard was very small, almost a dwarf, with a disproportionately large head. Long strands of sparse red hair had been combed across his domed cranium and lay there lank and damp, like seaweed on a rock after the tide has retreated. He wore a neat black suit and black tie, and, somewhat incongruously, a dark red rose in his buttonhole. He sat himself beside Maureen, smiling and nodding at the rest of us.

Den had decided to ignore him altogether, so I introduced myself and the boys. Mr Pigsny shook hands smilingly with all three of us, but, as far as I can remember, said nothing. The drive to the house took place in the purring near silence of the great black limousine, punctuated only by the occasional sniffle from Maureen.

Reg’s house was a detached mock Tudor mansion in an avenue of similar leafy refuges just outside Thurrock, that part of Essex being the place where all good criminals go to die. The lawns were clean shaven, the gravel deep in the drive, the Leylandii high and dense enough to frustrate any casual intruder. When we arrived a number of suited men with thick, impenetrable faces were clustered importantly on the drive, like staff officers before a battle.

Inside, the house was spacious and, though Sir Terence Conran might have shuddered, the decor did not reek of the kind of vulgar ostentation so often favoured by the criminal fraternity. There was, however, something of a clash of styles. Maureen had gone in for prettiness of the glazed chintz variety. The drawing room was in light pastel shades and the porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece were complemented by the pink Dresden shepherdesses on the wallpaper. Reg’s study and other parts of the house showed his more manly taste for dark oak and cherry-coloured leather. He owned one or two genuinely good pictures and antiques; in particular a magnificent blue and white Ming vase, about four feet high, decorated with dragon motifs. I had once expressed my admiration for it.

‘You’re not going to ask me where I got it or how much I paid, are you?’ he said.

‘My dear Reg, I wouldn’t dream of asking such sensitive questions,’ I answered. For some reason Reg found my reply extremely funny. I think he found
me
extremely funny sometimes. I don’t resent that, but I am slightly baffled. Very few of us are good at finding ourselves funny.

Our stretch limousine was one of the first vehicles to arrive at the house, but very soon people were coming thick and fast for the wake, and Reg’s mansion began to feel uncomfortably small. Cups of tea were being drunk, sweet sherry sipped, sandwiches devoured. My nephews were very soon engulfed by the crowd. I had tea accidentally spilled over me by a huge man with a shaven head. Almost immediately after the accident he was being berated by a little black-eyed woman in spectacles who then turned to me.

‘I’m so sorry, professor.’ She appeared to know who I was. ‘My hubby can be very clumsy sometimes,’ she said. ‘Now you apologise nicely to the professor.’

I accepted a mumbled apology from the man.

‘Introduce yourself properly, Horace,’ she said to him. ‘You know what I keep telling you about manners. This is my husband Horace, and I’m his better half, Enid.’

‘I’m the Hoxton Strangler,’ said the man.

‘That’s right, Horace,’ said his wife, ‘you’re the Hoxton Strangler, aren’t you? But that’s just, like his stage name. He’s a wrestler, you see: professional. We decided to call him the Hoxton Strangler.’

I shook a warm, sweaty, boxing glove of a hand, and would have liked to talk to him about the world of professional wrestling, but it was not to be. The Hoxton Strangler had a very rudimentary grasp of the art of conversation and soon the tide of people tore us apart.

I wanted to go home, but my nephews were nowhere to be seen. To escape the noise and the heat I decided to take refuge if possible in some less crowded part of the house. I peered into various rooms, only to find them noisily occupied. Eventually I tried the door of Reg’s study which I had expected to be locked. It was not.

It looked like the study of a cabinet minister. The furnishings were rich and sombre, the books on the shelves were mostly leather bound, doubtless bought (or stolen) by the yard. I had been in this room before but I had never before realised how pretentious it all was. Reg had been fooling himself that he was a man of consequence, a statesman of some kind; though probably he had kept up the pretence as much to impress others as for his own egotistical benefit.

‘Hello! What the fuck are you doing here?’

I started and looked round to see that Den was sitting at the desk in the window bay. He had been sorting through papers. Naturally he was not pleased to see me.

He said: ‘I suppose you’ve come for your vase, have you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The vase, that bloody blue thing.’ He pointed to a shelf where stood the exquisite Ming vase, innocent, untainted by the surrounding vulgarity and deception.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t give me that! You know perfectly well Reg left it to you in his will. Here,’ he said, waving a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘It says so here.’

‘How very generous of him. I had no idea.’

‘Yes. . . . Well. . . . Just take the thing and eff off, will you.’

‘I can’t do that. It should go through probate and . . . so on . . .’

‘Look, mate, what do you want?’

I was beginning to find my ex-bother-in-law extremely irritating. I said: ‘I don’t want anything. I just want to find my nephews and take them back to their mother as soon as possible.’

‘Well, they’re not here. And I’ve got work to do.’

There was a knock on the door.

‘Bloody Hell!’ said Den. This was apparently taken as an invitation to enter because the door opened and in came Mr Pigsny. He was carrying a black portfolio case which had not been with him in the limo.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it, short-arse,’ said Den. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,’ I said, making for the door. But Mr Pigsny barred my way holding up his hand palm outwards, like an old-fashioned traffic policeman. Though small, there was a curious air of solidity and authority about the man.

‘If you don’t mind, Professor Chibnall, I would prefer you to stay,’ said Mr Pigsny. ‘After all you are, as I understand, coexecutor of the late Mr McCall’s will with Mr Dennis here?’

I looked at Den in amazement. He made a face.

‘Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. I was going to tell you, only I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered with all the detail.’ I sat down in one of Reg’s masculine leather armchairs, too astonished to say anything.

‘I also understand,’ went on Mr Pigsny, ‘that I am mentioned in the will.’

‘If you’re expecting any money,’ said Den aggressively, ‘you’re out of luck, chummybum.’ Mr Pigsny sat down uninvited in the chair opposite Den.

‘I was not expecting any remuneration. Mr McCall and I agreed about that before his decease.’

‘All right,’ said Den. ‘There’s something in the will about retaining you as an adviser and that, but it’s not legally binding. I could have my brief overturn it just like that—’ he snapped his fingers. ‘And you’d be out on your arse, mate.’

Mr Pigsny sat quite still for a moment, apparently quite unmoved by Den’s threat; then he said: ‘I have something to show you gentlemen.’

He opened the portfolio and took out what looked like an unframed and unmounted black-and-white engraving, printed on heavy art paper roughly the size of an A3 sheet. He then rose from his chair and walked over to a circular table in the centre of the room. Having swept the books and papers on it unceremoniously to the floor he laid out the print on it with almost reverential care.

Den and I had been too astonished to move until Mr Pigsny beckoned us over to examine the item. For a good thirty seconds we both looked at it in silence. I doubt if we so much as breathed. From behind Reg’s thick study door came the faint lugubrious murmur of the wake.