“That’s it,” he said finally. “That’s everything. Up in smoke. I feel much better. That’ll show that vulture at Yale what I. think of him.”
I hesitated then.
“It isn’t the whole lot, Wexton,” I said finally. “There’s still all your letters to Steenie. They’re here, in the house. Do you want me to fetch them?”
“No,” Wexton said firmly. “Those belonged to Steenie, not me. Now they’re yours. You decide what to do with them.”
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “I’d kind of prefer them not to end up at Yale—or Austin. Austin’s getting really terrible, you know. Every writer’s graveyard. But you decide. Make another bonfire sometime … or don’t. It’s up to you. I trust you. Oh”—he paused—“and this wasn’t a hint to you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not suggesting you make a bonfire—or not yet anyway.”
We stood for a while, watching the fire burn down to bright spars of wood. Then, as dusk fell, we walked back to the house, my godfather and I.
Wexton was quiet over tea, and thoughtful. There was a brief interruption, when an almost-excited Gervase Garstang-Nott telephoned to say that he had finally pinned down his corporate raider/property developer, who had, it seemed, finally stopped shuttling between the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. He was now in London. He had agreed to come down to Winterscombe.
“Strike while the iron is hot!” said Garstang-Nott, uncharacteristically. “He wants to come down the day after tomorrow.”
An appointment was agreed upon. I felt faint stirrings of optimism, which I tried to clamp down on. I knew the corporate raider was likely to prove as lukewarm in his interest as the previous potential purchasers who had visited. Still, I felt a certain hope. And, as it turned out, I was justified. The corporate raider did not buy Winterscombe, but his visit was to prove important.
Wexton, still quiet and thoughtful after his bonfire, did not take a great deal of interest in the advent of the corporate raider. I was full of plans for making Winterscombe look enticing; Wexton did not listen. He helped me prepare dinner, but did so inattentively.
“About those journals,” he said finally, when dinner was over. “About Constance and your father—”
“Yes, Wexton?” I replied, tensing.
“Something’s bothering you. Something more than you said. Something you haven’t told me.”
“Yes, it is. Wexton, I don’t want to think about it—”
“Well, you’ll have to, sooner or later. It won’t go away. If it’s any help, I can guess what it is. It used to bother me, too—and Steenie.” He paused. “The accident to Shawcross—it’s about that, am I right?”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat cagily. I hesitated. “You had a theory about that, Wexton. I know, because Steenie mentions it, in one of those letters he never sent. He said you’d discussed it, and he’d decided you were both wrong.” I stopped. “I … wondered what it was, Wexton. It seemed odd—that you’d never told me.”
Wexton shrugged. “It was just a theory. Probably wrong. I don’t want to discuss it now. It wouldn’t be right.”
“It might upset me?”
“Yes. It might.” Insofar as he could, Wexton began to look evasive.
That evasiveness in Wexton alarmed me. I began to feel a little sick. I pushed the rest of my meal aside, unfinished.
It was steak, I remember that, because Wexton—more sanguine than I was—continued to eat with every appearance of good appetite. When he finally set down his fork, he smiled his benevolent smile and leaned forward. He mentioned Tibet. He made a further suggestion, an obvious one, I suppose—certainly one I should have considered.
The next morning, I acted upon it. After all, there was a professional solver of puzzles in my own family. I also happened to be very fond of him. And while I had no wish to upset him with my questions, he was, apart from Constance herself, the one person still alive who had been there, at Winterscombe, on the night of the comet party.
FOUR
I
CUI BONO?
MY UNCLE FREDDIE WAS THEN PAST SEVENTY. He Still lived in the house in Little Venice where I visited him for tea as a child. The house had, however, been smartened up: The sweep of a new broom in Freddie’s life could be detected the moment you entered the front gate. This new force was responsible for the gleaming brass mailbox and knocker, for the hedge, which was cut with military precision, and for a garden pond, installed since my last visit, which lay squarely beneath the windows. It was decorated by a fat and pugnacious cherub.
“Newts!” said Winnie as she opened the door to me and clasped me to her battleship bosom. She pointed at the pond with pride. “They’re our new thing. Absolutely fascinating.”
Winifred Hunter-Coote had been widowed in the mid-1950s, when I was living in New York. Winnie mourned her husband, Cootie, greatly, and still tended to wear black in his honor, but she was a sensible woman with a great zest for life, and widowhood did not suit her. Once she realized this, which took about two years, she set about the business of finding a new husband.
She cast around the circle of her acquaintance, hit upon my uncle Freddie, and carried him off within three months. The courtship was, I think, entirely on Winnie’s side. She had remained friends with Freddie after my mother’s death, and when she was casting about for a husband, she came here, to Little Venice, for tea. She looked around her, saw that Freddie was both unhappy and disorganized, and decided.
The deciding factor was Uncle Freddie’s detective novels. With these books (he had stuck to them; unlike his other enthusiasms, they never fizzled) Freddie had had steady and growing success. To his great astonishment, for Freddie was modest, a publisher had accepted his seventh attempt at the genre, and had then seemed inclined to accept its successors. Even more astonishingly, people actually went out, paid money, and bought them. Uncle Freddie knew this because they sometimes wrote to him, which he liked very much, and because he read the figures on his royalty statements.
The arrival of these statements, twice a year, was a time of great celebration. “Look,” Freddie would say. “Look, Victoria! I’ve sold three thousand, four hundred, and thirty-six copies! Isn’t that the most astonishing thing? I wonder who they all are, these people? I wonder how many guessed the murderer? It was the secretary, you know. He used a special poison—I had to read up on it. It was very interesting…. Now where did I put that poisons book?”
He generally could not find it—the poisons book, or the gun manual from which he had taken details of the pistol used, or the railway timetable that allowed the murderer to double-back and be in two places at once (one of Uncle Freddie’s favorite devices). He could not find it because Uncle Freddie’s house was the most terrible mess.
Winnie took this in with one glance, that day she went to tea. She looked at the fluffy crumb-strewn carpet, at the brass table with its cobra base, which no one had cleaned in years. She looked at the posters for German cabarets and at Mrs. O’Brien’s carpet slippers when she brought in the tea. She looked at the ink pot on the table in the window at which Freddie wrote, at the piles of papers, books, timetables, manuals, library tickets, filing cards—and she came to her decision. Uncle Freddie needed organization.
“Who types up your novels for you, Freddie?” she asked in a stern voice.
“Oh, some girl. Different girls. When they’re finished, I wrap them up and take them ’round to an agency.”
“An agency!” Winnie was deeply shocked. “Do they correct your spelling? Your spelling is terrible.”
“Well, no, they don’t.” Freddie looked sad. “I don’t think they spell terribly well either. And I did ask them once to have a look at the punctuation—you know, commas and those colon things—but I don’t think they were a great success. However”—he brightened—“I have a very nice editor. A very sound man. He does it.”
“I can type, Freddie,” Winnie said in a meaningful way. Since she wa
s merciful, she forbore to say that her spelling was also excellent and that she was a hotshot at grammar. She became thoughtful.
Later that afternoon, when Freddie proudly showed her his filing system, she became more thoughtful still.
“Look,” Freddie said. “You see, Winnie, I have it all organized. Pink cards for the suspects, blue ones for the clues. Then I can’t get muddled. Oh—and three murders per book! I make that a rule. Three murders—that’s the ticket.”
Winnie examined this filing system. At first the drawers stuck. When persuaded to open, cards flew out like confetti. Picking them up, Winnie found a suspect on a blue card and a clue concerning cream cakes on a pink one.
Inclined now to show less mercy, she pointed this out to Freddie.
Freddie sighed. “Oh, I know,” he said in a defeated voice. “I get so carried away. The plot, you know. I suppose what I really need is a secretary.”
Winnie gave him a firm glance. Privately, she had reached her decision: He needed not only a secretary, but also a wife.
Winnie was installed as his secretary within a week; after that the marriage was inevitable. Freddie, who had never been known to act hastily, used to boast of this.
“Winnie is a very determined woman,” he would say with obvious delight. “She took one look at me and swept me off my feet.”
They made an excellent, if unconventional, couple. My uncle Freddie, so ebullient as a boy, had lost his way through life at some point—perhaps because of Constance, perhaps because of the death of Boy, perhaps because of some flaw in his own character. For years he had been adrift. With the advent of Winnie, he discovered not just a sense of purpose but also a new and surprising energy.
He had been accustomed to write one detective story every two years; with Winnie, his literary output first doubled, then trebled. He invented a new detective, Inspector Coote (named in tribute to Winnie’s first husband). Inspector Coote, whose character was influenced, I think, by long conversations with Winnie, became a great favorite with Uncle Freddie’s readers. Freddie’s sales mounted. His royalty figures soared. He began to be published in America, where they liked his country-house settings; in Germany; in France. Freddie’s great strength was that the world he wrote about never changed. It was, basically, the world he had known as a boy. His books might be set in the present day, but Inspector Coote remained an energetic forty-five, and none of Freddie’s central characters could have contemplated life without a butler.
By the time I came to visit them that morning, Winnie and my uncle Freddie had been married for about ten years. They were inseparable. They were devoted. They were profoundly, demonstrably happy. They lived a life of undeviating regularity, in which Winnie organized everything and Uncle Freddie did as he was told. This suited them both. They had discovered the charms of routine.
At nine forty-five on the dot, Uncle Freddie was at his tidy writing table in the window of the sitting room, pen in hand; Winnie was at a very neat desk, of advanced design, at the other end of the room. Winnie typed; Uncle Freddie wrote.
They took a break for a snack (coffee, hot chocolate, and digestive biscuits) at eleven, a further brief break for lunch (served on trays by Mrs. O’Brien, who—like the house—had been smartened up). At three they took a walk together for half an hour, by the canal, always following precisely the same route. In the evenings, when work was over, they ate supper—again on trays—and watched television. Quiz shows, plays, soap operas, snooker, football, documentaries, reruns of I Love Lucy: whatever came on, they watched, with a contented lack of discrimination. Uncle Freddie was addicted to the controls. Since he liked people to look healthy, he adjusted the color tuner so everyone’s face was bright orange.
From this routine, Winnie and my uncle refused to depart. It was interrupted only once a year, when, in a sudden burst of intrepid energy, they took a two-week holiday of an adventurous nature. These grew more ambitious each year. They had already been up the Nile in a felucca. They had visited Angkor Wat. They had ridden camels into the Sahara. Most recently they had walked in the foothills of the Himalayas, and made that flying visit to Tibet.
When I visited, the brochures from which they would select the next year’s jaunt were already on the table. We sat in the workroom/sitting room drinking coffee. Uncle Freddie’s inkwell, blotting paper, and pen were laid out in readiness. Winnie’s typewriter sat waiting across the room, paper already inserted. Next to my mug of coffee were bright pictures of temples and pyramids, remote mountains and dangerous rivers. Winnie and Freddie were not yet decided, but they thought next year they might fly to Australia and camp in the outback. This was explained. The Himalayas were described. Then there was a pause. I began to feel guilty. I was interfering with the routine.
When I said this, they both became very kind.
“Nonsense,” Winnie trumpeted. “You look peaky. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Better get it off your chest, whatever it is. Come on, speak up. Is it a man? You can tell us, if it is. Freddie and I can’t be shocked. We’re very broad-minded. Come on—speak up. A problem shared is a problem halved. What is it?”
I hesitated again. They both waited. In the end, it seemed foolish to have gone this far and then to stop, so I said, “Well, it’s about Constance.”
Their reactions were swift. Winnie harrumphed. Uncle Freddie (who had, finally, been cured of Constance) raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Don’t tell me you’ve seen her again, Vicky. You know she’s a troublemaker.”
Winnie gave a huge snort. “I’ve met her, you know. Before your mother died. At Winterscombe. She used to wear very doubtful hats. Very doubtful indeed. I wouldn’t trust that woman one inch. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.” She gave me a magnificent glance. “Freddie knows,” she added, with great dignity, “what I think of her.”
A certain glance passed between Winnie and my uncle—a meaningful glance. I wondered then just how much Freddie had told Winnie about his own involvement with Constance. Given Winnie’s determined nature, I thought probably quite a lot. I could not imagine secrets between them.
There were pitfalls here, however, so I was careful. I explained about my visit to New York, about my search for Constance. Winnie tended to interrupt. At one point she made a hot speech in which she referred to Constance’s age (she added five years to it). She referred to gossip columns. She made a number of remarks about, first, maneaters and then nymphomania.
This word, on Winnie’s lips, surprised me very much. Winnie, seeing this, gave an airy wave of the hand.
“Oh, Freddie and I know all about things like that. We keep up, you know, Victoria. We saw a very interesting program on the question just the other night, on television. Most revealing. I told Freddie, he could use it in one of his plots. Handled in the right way, of course.”
There was then a pause. I noticed that silent messages were being exchanged between Winnie and Freddie. Winnie was rolling her eyes at him in a most peculiar way. She nodded in the direction of the mantelpiece (why the mantelpiece?), whereupon Freddie cleared his throat.
“You didn’t see him, by any chance, when you were in New York?” He blushed. “I just wondered, after all this time, if you might have—”
“No. I didn’t see him.”
“I think about him now and again.” Freddie looked embarrassed. “Winnie and I—we’d like to see you settled, you know. We both thought … you seemed so well suited. I liked him very much. He was—”
“Is, Freddie, is. He is … an exceptional man. A fine man.”
“Winnie—” I began.
“And what’s more, he’s still unmarried,” Winnie continued. “Freddie and I still take an interest. We follow his career. Of course, I always knew he would be a success. You could see—the drive, the dedication. Do you know, there was an article about him in The Times, just the other day. Now where did you put it, Freddie? I clipped it specially—”
“Please, Winnie, I’d rather not read it,” I began, but
protests were useless. I just had time to feel grateful that neither Winnie nor my uncle had mentioned his name (it still made me agitated; it still hurt me) when the newspaper clipping was produced. It had been in readiness, just beneath that brochure for the outback. A reprint from a profile in The New York Times: the headline was A CONQUEROR OF INNER SPACE.
The accompanying photograph was large and had been taken at the Scripps-Foster Institute. It had been taken, I saw, by Conrad Vickers, and Vickers—that chronicler of our times, that recorder of the beautiful, the fashionable, the gifted, and the damned—photographed very few scientists.
Dr. Frank Gerhard was by then a very eminent scientist, a leader in his field, but that was not the reason Vickers had accepted the commission—I knew that at once. No, Vickers would have wanted to photograph this man for the quality of his face—an arresting face, and one it pained me still to look at.
Vickers had photographed him in that celebrated laboratory, surrounded by the impedimenta of his profession. His right hand touched a microscope; he was leaning forward; Vickers had caught him, I thought, in mid-speech.
Impassioned speech—I could see that. Dr. Gerhard would have been speaking of his work and Vickers had caught upon his features a look I remembered well: a poise between intensity and reticence, conviction and melancholy. Dr. Gerhard had a driven face.
I did not read the article then—indeed, I think I could not have read it, for the words would not lie still upon the page. Isolated phrases sprang out at me; I saw that the cancer research work continued; I saw that the journalist described this research as a quest, that he wrote of the charting of new worlds, that he (but not Dr. Gerhard) touched on the possibility of cures.