Symposium

  For the first time she met Dan Murchie, Margaret’s father. He wore tinted glasses and came into the room with that stiff, correct, Jaruzelski walk that we used to see on the television when the Polish news came up.

  ‘Well, Hilda (if I may),’ he said, ‘what sort of a journey did you have? Sit down. I’m glad you found us without difficulty. What would you like to drink? Whisky, gin, vodka, sherry, anything.’

  She asked for a whisky and soda. In came Greta. ‘So lovely to see you,’ said Greta (in black and white, she also), ‘especially now that the arrangements are all made and the worst’s over, one can relax. It’s the third wedding I’ve coped with. My two other daughters. Margaret’s the third. The fourth is still at school so I suppose we have that to come one of these days. What a pity you couldn’t have come sooner or stayed on a bit; we could get to know one another.’

  Her husband handed his wife a vodka and tonic, clinking with ice. He took a neat whisky for himself, tossed it back and poured another.

  Hilda thought, ‘They are quite all right but there’s something wrong.’ Then she thought, ‘Why should I give a damn?’ She sat back in her chair, knowing herself to look splendid, and aware, as they must be aware, that she was very rich and altogether an independent person.

  ‘It was all so sudden,’ said Greta. Hilda felt she had expected her to say just that. Was there anything to be said or done that everyone else wouldn’t say or do? Hilda thought: ‘I have been much too successful. I am out of touch. This, obviously, is what ordinary life is like.’

  The Murchies made their living out of quarrying granite and other stone. They had a well organized small business about which Hilda had found out before she left Australia. Dan Murchie of Murchie & Sons, Quarriers and Extractors, Mining Equipment Supplied, was about to retire. But the family business was involved in a sub-contractual way with the Channel Tunnel; and Hilda assumed they needed that sort of money which is necessary to make very much more money. If Margaret had not met William casually in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, she would have suspected, and without rancour, that the Murchies might be after William’s, that was to say, her, money. It was a situation that Hilda could not have it in her to be too sure of, too cynical about. People did fall in love, quite simply.

  ‘You must be dead tired,’ said Hilda to Greta.

  ‘No, as a matter of fact, these days you know with the firms ready to take on practically the whole wedding, it isn’t so very tiring. They do the flowers, mail the invitations, set out the presents, everything. One only has to supervise. The list of guests is always a problem. Your list isn’t so very long, practically all friends of William.’

  ‘As I wrote to you, mine are nearly all in Australia,’ said Hilda, sipping her drink. ‘However those few who can come — it’ll be good to see them.’ And she thought: William’s first wedding. There will be others.

  She had met Margaret in London. She didn’t think the marriage would last. That goody-goody type of girl, how could she be real?

  Hilda had sat good-humouredly in their too-small flat and chatted as she noticed.

  ‘Marks & Spencer’s fruit section. What on earth were you doing there, William?’

  ‘Buying fruit,’ he said. ‘I always went there, it was convenient.’

  ‘And you,’ she said to Margaret in her best Sandringham-type manner, ‘was that your favourite fruit shop?’

  ‘No, I was just there by chance.’ She gave a little smile, put her head on one side. ‘Lucky chance,’ she said.

  William sat there goggling at his bride-to-be as if she were a Miss Universe who had taken a double first at Cambridge, or some such marvel.

  ‘I shall give you a flat for a wedding present,’ Hilda had said. ‘That is all I propose to do.’

  ‘Why, it’s too much,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Very generous,’ said William. After all, what could he say?

  ‘My parents’, said Margaret, ‘are dying to meet you.

  ‘It’s a most exciting occasion,’ Hilda had said, holding out her glass to William for her drink to be repeated.

  ABOUT two weeks before the dinner party, Hurley Reed met Annabel Treece unexpectedly at the television studios. Hurley had been attending a session as adviser for a television play in which an artist was depicted. It was six in the evening. Annabel had just finished her day’s work. She was normally a documentary producer. They went to have a drink.

  ‘They are talking about this artist character’s retiring,’ said Hurley. ‘All wrong. Artists don’t retire. There’s nothing for them to retire about.’

  ‘I hope you told them so,’ said Annabel who admired Hurley. ‘In a way it’s a waste of your precious time, this advisory job.’

  ‘But I like to see them do it right,’ Hurley said. ‘In this case, for instance, the painter is not perpendicular enough. He shouldn’t be shown to look away from the canvas to talk while his hand is painting with the brush. I like things done right. Personally, if I were a butler or a valet I would do it right. I would know how to do it.’

  ‘How would you know?’ said Annabel. ‘Have you had the experience?’

  ‘Yes, on the employer’s side,’ Hurley said. ‘Since I’ve been with Chris we’ve always had a manservant or two.’

  ‘This is something I’d like to hear more about, for when I do that TV profile of you,’ said Annabel.

  ‘I’d rather leave the butler out of it,’ said Hurley. ‘Quite honestly, for an artist that sort of thing is counter-productive. At the other end of the scale, so is starvation and garrets. If the public thinks you’re too well off they figure the art must be superficial, and if you’re poor they think there’s something wrong with the art, and why doesn’t it sell?’

  But Annabel was not to be waylaid. She was storing up an idea which she felt would impress her superiors when it came to persuading them to take on her projected profile of Hurley. About the observations he had just made, she was not concerned. (Artist … butler … maybe include rich Australian consort … ) ‘What’s the name of your butler?’ said Annabel.

  ‘Charterhouse,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ he said. ‘But it’s true, it’s on all his papers and references. We only just hired him.’

  ‘Is he any good?’

  ‘Perfect. Except he already talks about wanting a few weeks off in the late fall.’

  ‘Did he say “fall”?’ said quick Annabel.

  ‘No, he said, “Autumn, sir.” He wants time off to take his Greek wife back to Greece where she insists that she has to claim her dowry. I daresay that means twelve sheets, six pillow-cases. They haven’t been married long, the fools.’

  ‘Do you think marriage is foolish?’

  Hurley ignored this. ‘Chris is going to let him go on vacation. But first we’re counting on him for a few occasions, including a dinner. After that, let him go to Greece. A small dinner, we thought, rather special.’

  ‘Chris invited me, I was thrilled,’ said Annabel.

  He enumerated the list of guests, some of whom she hadn’t met.

  ‘It sounds charming,’ she said.

  ‘They will constitute an interesting cocktail,’ Hurley said. ‘That’s what one asks of a dinner party.’

  ‘And I’m looking forward to seeing Charter-house,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Nothing special to see,’ said Hurley. He smiled at Annabel and paid the bill for their drinks.

  To her cousin Roland Sykes with whom she had supper that night Annabel said, ‘I hear you’re going to Chris Donovan’s dinner party.’

  ‘I’ve been asked. I don’t know if I can manage, ‘he said, as he always said; to the effect that she took no notice.

  ‘I met Hurley,’ she said. ‘He told me who’s coming. There’s a newly married couple; he’s the son of that magnate tycoon woman, Mrs Damien, an Australian; you remember there was an article about her in one of the Sunday supplements. Her son got married to a girl called M
argaret Murchie from St Andrews. Hurley says they met in Marks & Spencer’s, the fruit section.’

  ‘Murchie?’ said Roland.

  ‘Well, it’s an old Scottish name.’

  ‘I know. From St Andrews, you said?’

  Annabel’s cousinship to Roland was from the mother’s side, his from the father’s. They both had brothers and sisters, but Annabel and Roland were much closer to each other than to any other members of their family. Annabel was more than five years his senior. Their devotion dated back to their teens, when he was fourteen, she nineteen. They would have married or been lovers, certainly, had Roland not from his teens been sexually attracted to men more than he was to women. Roland shared a large flat with a busy journalist towards whom he was friendly without further complications; the flatmate always had a girl-friend to stay some nights and all weekends but the spaciousness of the flat made it easy for Roland to avoid them. He felt very comfortable at home. But it was to Annabel that he brought his sorrows and griefs. He had for some years been thinking and deciding whether he should come down, finally,‘ on one side’ as he put it, meaning that he wanted to give up homosexuality and get married. It was not easy in the sense that it was a course of action easier to decide, and even to attempt to put into practice, than to realize, for he had been known as a homosexual, and the sort of girls he would have liked to marry were not, so far, available to him. These woes he fully confided to Annabel, since there was now no question of romantic love between them. It was too late. Their relationship had set into an abiding family closeness. The thought of going to bed with her cousin Roland would not have pleased Annabel, while for his part, in his present state of mind, he would have thought her too old. They were, all the same, dearer to each other than most cousins, most sisters and brothers, are to each other.

  Roland was by profession a genealogist, an honest one, much as he was sometimes tempted to soar into the clouds of mythology to clinch his findings. He worked for a large firm of private investigators whose main activity was spying on lovers and tracing missing people. But a substantial profit was made by Roland’s branch of the business. He traced people’s ancestry. Mostly those were people who had made a lot of money and who felt they must be, or might be, descendants of some distinguished house or family or person; also, in many cases, they wanted some form of crest and motto to put on their dinner forks and spoons or to have engraved on their signet rings.

  Members of the Church of the Mormons or Latter-day Saints were particularly good clients for genealogists in England; from Utah alone came substantial revenues, since descendance from Joseph Smith or one of their enlightened founders was considered by them to be a personal asset.

  One way and another Roland was kept busy. He knew where to look for documents, what public record offices, what historical archives and where the papers were kept, what parish registers, throughout the country, and he was familiar with emblems of heraldry, those still flourishing and current and those which were extinct. He was also an excellent paleographer, so that he could decipher the peculiarities of handwriting, spelling and the varying dialects of scribes, clerks, clergy, lawyers, judges and country gentlemen dead long and many centuries since. And he was honest in this: he exploded as many false claims of pedigree as he discovered true ones. But in the process of explaining, not much was in fact quite straightforward: there were areas of doubt. Roland was firm about expressing doubts where doubts existed, and if the clients wanted to give themselves the benefit of the doubt that was their business.

  In Annabel’s brown and green sitting-room Roland waited for Annabel’s dinner to announce itself ready by the ping of a timer bell. He said, looking into his drink and swirling it round, ‘Murchies of St Andrews?’

  ‘You know the family?’ said Annabel.

  Roland, an extremely busy young man, did not normally know families as such. Like specialist doctors he had to consult his records if clients came back saying they had been to him before. He had an efficient computer service at his disposal. But his natural memory usually told him a lot.

  ‘There was something about the Murchies last year. I’m sure it was St Andrews,’ he said. ‘But of course, the details … I’ll have to check. I did some research, yes, but there was something else. They wanted to claim a fortune but didn’t succeed in the courts, it was all in the papers. It need not be the same family.’

  ‘We’ll meet the girl on the 18th.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can go.’

  ‘Oh yes, love, you can go to the dinner. If there’s anything nice in this world it’s Chris and Hurley’s dinners. But I want you there so we can talk about it afterwards.’

  Ping, ping, went the cooking bell. Annabel sidled into her kitchen, then called Roland, ‘Supper’s ready!’

  Suddenly he thought: What, what, would I do without Annabel?

  She said, ‘You’ve changed your hair-style.’ Normally his hair was dark, with a side parting. Now he had it cut brush-like sticking up a little on top of his head, very short at the sides, and silvered.

  ‘It’s a change,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t think it would persuade a woman that you’ve changed,’ said Annabel.

  ‘To a young girl today it means neither one thing nor another,’ said Roland.

  ‘It would mean something to me,’ said Annabel, ‘and I’m not so old.’ She was thirty-two, he twenty-seven.

  ‘I’ll try it out for a while,’ Roland said. ‘Maybe you’re right. If so, I wonder why?’

  ‘It looks as if you’ve spent hours and hours at the hairdresser,’ Annabel said.

  ‘So I did,’ he said.

  ‘And it will grow out quickly. You’ll have to spend more hours keeping it up. I don’t say’, she said, ‘that it doesn’t look good. It makes you look decidedly attractive.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m glad to know it. I was getting bored with myself.’

  ‘You belong to the eighteenth century,’ she said. ‘The men were obsessed by their hair and their wigs. You can see by the portraits. Psychologically, you are eighteenth century.’

  ‘You told me so once before. I forget why.’

  ‘It was because I’m eighteenth century too. Basically, my morals are eighteenth century. That’s why we get on so well, I think. We’ve both of us skipped the nineteenth century in our genes.’

  LONG before Margaret Murchie met William Damien in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s in Oxford Street — nearly two years before — she sat with her parents and an uncle in the cluttered sitting-room of turreted Blackie House within the sound of the North Sea at St Andrews. It was a glorious October day; the light had that angelic radiance of a Scottish autumn and its tingling freshness, so welcome to people who enjoy feeling cold, as the Scots so often do.

  ‘What is your advice, Uncle Magnus?’ said Margaret.

  Magnus was the only imaginative factor that had ever occurred in the Murchies’ family, but unfortunately he was mad, and had to spend his days in the Jeffrey King hospital, a mental clinic in Perthshire from where he was fetched, early on most Sunday mornings, to spend the day at Blackie House. Magnus was beyond cure, but modern medicine had done a great deal to mitigate his condition. He had a mad look. He was large, and ate voraciously. There had been a time when he was too violent to have at home, but thanks to the pills they gave him he was violent no more. He had always had periods of comparative lucidity, hours and hours of clarity, even days of it. Then, at any moment, he might go off on his ravings.

  Many families have at least one fairly mad member, whether in or out of an institution. But the families do not normally consult the mad people even if they have lucid periods; the families do not go to them for advice. The Murchies were different.

  Dan and Greta Murchie swore by the sagacity of Dan’s elder brother, Magnus. Greta felt he was inspired.

  ‘In the Middle Ages,’ Greta said, ‘the insane were considered to be divinely illuminated.’

  ‘He’s my brother as well,’ Dan said. ‘He can
’t be all that mad.’

  ‘And there’s a way of willing people to be serviceable,’ said Greta. ‘You can use your willpower and make what is not so, so. Everyone knows that.’

  And Dan contributed a doctrine of St Thomas Aquinas which, like several others of the philosopher’s teaching, does not stand up to practicality: Do not, wrote Aquinas, take note of who is speaking, but of what is said take note.

  Greta brought to the question a final consideration: ‘The nursing home is costing us a lot of money. Let us get something back.’ In fact it was Magnus’s money which was keeping him in the private clinic, but to Greta and Dan it came to the same thing.

  Magnus had now been their guru for six years. He it was who had suggested a course of action which was to cause the Murchie scandal.

  He had a vast beard. Wearing a bright blue and satin-silvered windjammer, black leather trousers and elaborate brown leather country boots of a very recent design, with four cross-straps and the name Steiner imprinted on the front, Magnus lorded it over his Sunday outing.

  The Murchies’ aged mother was now sick in a nursing home in Edinburgh. Mad Magnus and Dan were her only sons. She had three daughters, two of whom were unmarried and decidedly helpless. The third was married and lived in Kenya where her husband had a business job.

  Everyone knew that the old and failing Mrs Murchie had left her fortune equally among her five children. She had made it clear. It was a Scottish will, with quaint but decided mention of ‘the bairns’ part’. The will had been written long ago in 1935 on the death of her husband.

  ‘Out of date,’ said Magnus. ‘Besides, I don’t want my part. It will only go to the Master in Lunacy.’ He was referring to the old-fashioned term for Master of the Court of Protection, the present authority whose office deals with the interests of mad people.