From the garage at the back there was the sudden sound of the Wrangler being started and gunned impatiently. I’d got used to Buddy Breukink’s manner by now and I recognized his touch. Varoom, varoom, varoom, went the engine. Mrs O’Raffety looked up to the sky with a pained expression. It wouldn’t require an overdeveloped imagination to see suppressed rage in just about everything that Buddy did.
‘They quarrelled about the education of my little grandson Peter.’ No need for her to say who she was talking about. ‘Buddy has his own ideas but my daughter wants him brought up in the Jewish faith.’ She drank some iced tea.
I was fully occupied with the elaborate ‘lobster salad’ that had been put before me. Every salad vegetable I’d ever heard of – from Shiitaki mushrooms to lotus root – made a decorative jardiniére for half a dozen baby lobster tails in rich mayonnaise. On a separate pink plate there was a hot baked potato heaped with sour cream and garnished with small pieces of crispy bacon. Salads in California are not designed for weight-loss. I looked up from my plate. Mrs O’Raffety was looking at me quizzically. She waited until I nodded.
‘It’s solely a question of the female line,’ she explained, prodding at a radish that rolled over and escaped. ‘My mother was a Jew, so I am a Jew. Therefore my daughter is a Jew and so her son is a Jew. Buddy just can’t seem to understand that.’
‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, ‘it’s difficult to reconcile with a mother-in-law named O’Raffety.’
She looked at me with a stern expression I’d noticed when she was swimming. Her eyes were glacial blue. ‘Maybe it is,’ she conceded. ‘Maybe it is. Mind you, I’m not strict. We don’t eat kosher. You can’t with Mexican kitchen staff.’
‘And where is your little grandson now?’
‘In Florida. Last week Buddy was taking lunch with a private detective. I’m frightened he’s got some plan to take the child away somewhere.’
‘Kidnap him?’
‘Buddy gets emotional.’
‘But he’s a lawyer.’
‘Even lawyers get emotional,’ she said, dismissing the subject without entirely condemning such emotion. As the sound of Buddy’s jeep receded she went back to the subject of being European. ‘I was born in Berlin,’ she told me. ‘I have relatives in Berlin. Maybe one day I’ll seek them out. But then I ask myself: who needs more relatives.’ She toyed with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and a gold lighter, as if trying to resist temptation.
‘You came to America as a child?’
She nodded. ‘But lost the language. A few years back I started taking German lessons, but I just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. All those bothersome verbs…’ She laughed. ‘More wine?’
‘Thank you.’
She plucked the bottle from the bucket. ‘A friend of mine – not far from here – makes it. His Chablis is excellent, the rosé is good – wonderful colour – but the red doesn’t quite come off so I keep to the French reds.’ She poured the remainder of the wine into my glass. She called all white wines Chablis; everyone in California seemed to do that.
‘What about you, Mrs O’Raffety?’ I said. She never invited me to call her by her first name and I noticed that even her son-in-law addressed her in that same formal way, so she must have liked being Mrs O’Raffety. She had, I suppose, paid enough for the privilege.
‘I take only half a glass. Chablis affects the joints you know, it’s the uric acid.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
The bottle dripping from the ice water had made her fingers wet. Fastidiously she dried her hands on a pink towel before touching the cigarettes again. ‘You’re easy to talk to,’ she said, looking at me through narrowed eyes as if my appearance might explain it. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that? It’s a gift being a good listener. You listen but show no curiosity; I suppose that’s the secret.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ I said.
‘You can’t imagine how excited Bret was to hear you were actually coming.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing him again.’
‘He’s with the physiotherapist right now. Miss a session and he’s set back a week: that’s what the doctor says, and he’s right. I know. All my life I’ve suffered with this darn disc of mine.’ She touched her back as if remembering the pain.
When I finished the lobster salad a servant magically appeared to remove the plates to a side-table: mine totally cleaned and Mrs O’Raffety’s still laden with food.
‘Do you mind if I smoke, Mr Samson?’
The Mexican servant – a muscular middle-aged man with the tight skin and passive face of the Indian – waited for her orders. There was not only a dignity about him, there was an element of repressed strength, like a fierce dog that was awaiting the order to spring.
I felt like inviting Mrs O’Raffety to call me Bernard, but she was the sort of woman who might decline such an invitation. ‘It’s your home,’ I told her.
‘And my lungs. Yes, that’s what Buddy tells me.’ She gave a throaty little laugh and tugged a cigarette from the pack on the table. The servant bent over and lit it for her. ‘Now, Mr Samson: fresh strawberries? Raspberries? Cook’s home-made blueberry pie? What else is there, Luis?’ There was something disconcerting about the way that California’s menus defied the strictures of the seasons. ‘The pies are just gorgeous,’ she added but didn’t ask for any.
When I’d decided upon blueberry pie and icecream, and the silent Luis had departed to get it, Mrs O’Raffety said, ‘You’ll notice the change in him. Bret, I mean, he’s not the man he used to be.’ She looked at the burning tip of her cigarette. ‘He’ll want to tell you how tough he is, of course. Men are like that, I know. But don’t encourage him to do anything stupid, will you?’
‘What sort of stupid thing is he likely to do?’
‘The physician has him on drugs up to here.’ She held her hand up to her head. ‘And he has to rest in the afternoon too. He’s sick.’
‘The surgeons in Berlin didn’t expect him to survive,’ I said. ‘He’s lucky to have you to look after him, Mrs O’Raffety.’
‘What else could I do? The hospital bills were piling up, and Bret had some lousy British insurance scheme that didn’t even cover the cost of his room.’ She smoked her cigarette. ‘I got Buddy to try getting more money from them but you know what insurance companies are like.’
‘You were the good Samaritan,’ I said.
‘Who else did he have who would take him? And I was related to him in a crazy roundabout way. Not kin. My grandfather married Bret’s widowed mother. She changed the children’s names to Rensselaer. Bret’s real name was Turner.’
‘He was married,’ I said.
‘Do you know his wife?’ She flicked ash into the ashtray.
‘No.’
‘I contacted her. I wrote and told her Bret was on the point of death. No reply. She never even sent a get-well card.’ Mrs O’Raffety inhaled deeply and blew smoke in a manner that displayed her contempt. She reminded me of Cindy Matthews just for a moment. They were both women who knew what they wanted.
‘Perhaps she’d moved house,’ I suggested.
‘Buddy got someone on to that. She cashes her alimony check every month without fail. She got my letter all right. She’s taken all the money from him and doesn’t give a damn. How can a woman behave that way?’ She drank iced tea and waited while a huge portion of blueberry pie with icecream and whipped cream was put on the table for me. Then she said, ‘Bret and I were kids together. I was crazy about him. I guess I always figured we’d be married. Then one day he went downtown and joined the Navy. I waited for him. Waited and waited and waited. The war ended but he never came back.’
‘Never came back?’
‘Never came back to live hereabouts. London, Berlin. I got letters and cards from him. Long letters sometimes but the letters never said the one thing I wanted to hear.’
I started eating my pie.
‘You didn’t think you were going to hear the confessions of a lon
ely old lady. Well, I don’t know what got me started. You knowing Bret, I suppose. The only other acquaintance Bret and I have in common is that bitch of a wife of his.’
‘So you know her?’ She had spoken of her distantly, as if she existed only as a spender of Bret’s money.
‘Nikki? Sure I know her. I knew what would happen to that marriage right from the start. Right from the moment she told me she was going to marry him. Sometimes I think she only went for him because she knew how much I would suffer.’
‘Is she from around here?’
‘Nikki Foster? Her folks had a shoe store in Santa Barbara. She was at school with me. She always was a little bitch.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘Eight long miserable years they lived together, or so I understand. I’ve never spoken to Bret about her and he never mentions her name.’
‘And he had a brother.’
‘Sheldon.’ She gave an enigmatic little chuckle. ‘Ever met him?’
‘No.’ I said.
‘Big man in Washington DC. Big, big man. A nice enough guy but always on his way to somewhere better: know what I mean?’
‘I know what you mean.’
She lowered her voice. ‘And none of them seem to have any money. What did they do with all that Rensselaer money? That’s what I’d like to know. Old Cy Rensselaer must have been sitting on a fortune when he died. Surely Bret couldn’t have given so much of it to that awful woman. But if not, where did it go?’
I don’t know what I was expecting but Bret Rensselaer, when I finally got to see him, looked far from fit and well. He was somewhere about sixty, a slim, tailored figure in white cotton slacks, white tee shirt and white gym shoes. It could have been the height of fashion but on his frail figure the outfit looked institutional. He smiled. He’d kept that tight-jawed smile and he’d kept his hair.
But now he’d aged. His cheeks were drawn and his face wrinkled. And yet something of that former youth had been replaced with distinction, as a film star might age and become a president. He was doing some gentle arm exercises when I entered the room. ‘Bernard,’ he called amiably. His exertions had made him a little out of breath. ‘Sorry to be so elusive, Bernard, but there’s no way they’ll let me break this routine.’ He always put the accent on the second half of my name, and hearing him say it in that low burring accent brought back memories. I looked around at this private gym. Someone had spent a lot of money on it: the upstairs had been ripped out to make a ‘cathedral’ ceiling, there were polished wood bars right across one wall, and a picture window in the other. The floor was wood blocks and the room was equipped with an exercise bicycle, a rowing machine and a big steel frame with a seat inside, and weights and pulleys, like some instrument of torture. Bret was inside it pulling and pushing levers. ‘It’s time I finished,’ he said.
It was that moment of the late afternoon when nature comes to a complete standstill. Even up here on the hillside, there was no wind, not a leaf moved and no birds flew. The afternoon sun – now low and far away over the Pacific Ocean – gilded everything, and the air was heavy and suffocating. It was at this moment that sunlight coming through the big window painted Bret – and the machine that encaged him – gold, so that he looked like the statue of a remote, wrinkled and pagan god.
‘I hear they’re getting you ready for the Decathlon.’
Bret looked gratified by this silly compliment. He smiled the shy fleeting smile that he’d used on the best-shaped girls from the typing pool and rubbed his face. ‘Three hours a day but it pays off. In just the last two months I’m really getting back into shape,’ he said. He climbed out of his machine and wiped his forehead with a towel.
‘Sounds grim.’
‘And with an ex-Marine Corps medic to put you through it, it is grim,’ said Bret with that proud masochistic relish that all men are prone to at times. ‘I even went skiing.’
‘Not bad!’
‘Sun Valley. Just a weekend. Easy slopes: no black runs or double diamonds.’ He shook my hand and gripped it tight. For a moment we stood looking at each other. Despite all our ups and downs I liked him and I suppose he knew that. Three years ago when he’d really been in trouble it was me he came to and for some stupid reason that I could not fathom I was proud of that. But Bret had spent too much of his life with the rich and powerful, and he’d developed the hard carapace that all such people use to hide their innermost feelings. He smiled as he let go of my hand and punched my arm gently. ‘Jesus Christ! It’s good to see you, Bernard. How is everything in the Department?’
‘We’re managing, but only just.’
‘But Dicky never got Europe?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that’s just as well. He’s not ready for that one yet. How are you getting along with the Deputy? I hear he’s kicking ass.’ He indicated that I should sit down on the bench and I did so.
‘We see a lot more of him,’ I admitted.
‘That’s good. A Deputy with a knighthood hasn’t got so much to work for,’ said Bret. ‘I suppose he wants to show he’s keen.’
‘He didn’t get the K for working in the Department,’ I pointed out.
‘Is that a cry from the heart?’ said Bret, and laughed a sober little laugh that didn’t strain his muscles.
I hadn’t meant to criticize the Deputy’s lack of experience but it reminded me that a chat with Bret was like a session on a polygraph. And as soon as the subject of honours and titles came up Bret’s face took on a predatory look. It always amazed me that educated and sophisticated people such as Bret, Dicky and Frank were so besotted by these incongruous and inconvenient devices. But that’s how the system worked: and at least it cost the taxpayer nothing. ‘The Deputy will be all right,’ I said. ‘But a lot of people don’t like new ideas, no matter who’s selling them.’
‘Frank Harrington for instance,’ said Bret.
He’d hit it right on the nose, of course. Frank – so near to retirement – would oppose change of any sort. ‘I get to hear things, Bernard. Even over here I get to know what’s going on. The D-G tells me what’s what.’
‘The D-G does?’
‘Not personally,’ said Bret.
‘We hardly ever see him nowadays,’ I said. ‘Everyone says he’s sick and going to retire early.’
‘And let the Deputy take over…Yes, I hear the same stories, but I wouldn’t write the D-G out of the script too early. The old devil likes to be a back-seat driver.’
‘I should come out here and talk to you more often, Bret,’ I said admiringly.
‘Maybe you should, Bernard,’ he said. ‘Sometimes an onlooker sees the game more clearly than the players.’
‘But do any of the team take advice from the stands?’
‘That’s the same old Bernard I used to know,’ he said in a manner which might, or might not, have been sarcastic. ‘And your lovely Gloria? Is that still going strong?’
‘She’s a good kid,’ I said vaguely enough for him to see that I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘I heard you’d set up house with her.’
Damn him, I thought, but I kept my composure. ‘I rented the town house and got a mortgage on a place in the suburbs.’
‘You can never go wrong with real estate,’ he said.
‘I’ll go wrong with it if my father-in-law turns nasty,’ I said. ‘He guaranteed the mortgage. Even the bank doesn’t know I’m renting it yet.’
‘That will be all right, Bernard. Maybe they’ll inch your payments up but they won’t give you a bad time.’
‘Half the house belongs to Fiona. If her father claimed it on her behalf I’d be into a legal wrangle.’
‘You did get legal advice?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m trying not to think about it.’
Bret pulled a face of disapproval. People like Bret got legal advice before taking a second helping of carbohydrates. ‘The Department would help,’ said Bret in that authoritative way he was inclined to voice his speculati
ons.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. I was in fact somewhat fortified by his encouragement, no matter how flimsy it was.
‘You don’t think Fiona might come back?’ he said. He put on a cardigan. The sun had gone now and there was a drop in the temperature.
‘Come back!’ I said. ‘How could she? She’d find herself in the Old Bailey.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Bret. ‘How long has she been away?’
‘A long while.’
‘Bide your time,’ said Bret. ‘You’re not thinking of getting married again are you?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Come back to me,’ said Bret. ‘Any problem about the house or your father-in-law, or anything like that, you come back to me. Phone here; leave a number where I can reach you. Understand?’
‘Why you, Bret? I mean thanks. But why you?’
‘Ever hear of the Benevolent Fund?’ said Bret, and without waiting for me to say no I hadn’t, he added, ‘They recently made me the President of the Fund. It’s an honorary title but it gives me a chance to keep in touch. And the Fund is for this kind of problem.’
‘Benevolent Fund?’
‘These problems are not of your making, Bernard. Sure your wife defected but there’s no way that can be laid at your door. It’s the Department’s problem and they’ll do what they can.’ He stopped studying his fingernails for long enough to give me a sincere look straight in the eyes.
I said, ‘I envy you your faith in the Department’s charity and understanding, Bret. Maybe that’s what keeps you going.’
‘It comes with being an Anglophile, Bernard.’ He put both hands in his pockets and grinned. ‘And talking about your marriage, what do you hear about Fiona?’
‘She’s working for the other side,’ I said stolidly. He knew I didn’t want to discuss any of this but it didn’t deter him. I’d been hoping to hear why he’d been playing possum all this time, but he was obviously unwilling to confide in me.