A Fatal Attachment (23 page)

“Why was that?”

Andy gestured towards the picture of their eldest son in naval finery.

“We thought she hated seeing that. She used to avert her eyes from it. You'll have noticed she had the same picture herself, but she hated us having it.”

“But that's absurd!” said Oddie. “Your son . . .”

“In emotional matters Lydia could be absurd,” said Thea forcefully. “Like marrying the brother of the man she really loved. She had fought with us for Gavin and she had won. She resented us having any part in him.”

“That's how you see it, is it? She won?”

“It's difficult to see it any other way as far as Gavin was concerned,” said Andy, sadly. “Oh, we won our small victories. She wanted to pay to send the boys to a public school. Lydia always believed that the inevitable concomitant of a pure heart was a Standard Southern English accent. We put our foot down. On that sort of matter we had some power, just because we were the parents. But Lydia made sure, through having so much to do with them, that
there wasn't a trace of Yorkshire in their accents. Maurice likes to use vernacular now and then, being so involved with
Waterloo Terrace,
but he always does it within inverted commas. So in little ways her influence lingers on.”

“I gather that at one time Lydia was trying to urge Maurice towards politics,” said Charlie.

“Was she? I'm sure you're right. The boys didn't tell us things, you see. . . .

The husband and wife looked at each other, then quickly away.

“Well,” said Oddie, “she certainly failed in that.”

“Oh yes,” said Andy. “With Maurice she failed almost entirely. That was the danger, wasn't it, of working on adolescent minds. They grow up. Talking about it now it seems pathetic rather than wicked, the fact that Lydia had to have relationships with boys rather than men. She couldn't sustain a relationship of equals. When you come down to it, the relationships after Robert were all with people who were immature.”

“After
Robert?” queried Charlie. “I don't see anything particularly mature about turning your life into a perpetual boy scouts' camp.”

M
AURICE
Hoddle walked restlessly up and down the thickly carpeted floor of his office in Midlands Television. The office was a good-sized one, as it needed to be, since it was frequently used for script conferences. It was furnished with the bogus-luxurious anonymity which characterises offices in modern buildings all over the world. Maurice humanised it by untidiness and family snapshots—again, as higher executives of the pleasanter kind did all over the world. Shooting scripts for
Waterloo Terrace
littered both desk and chairs, and a sad pile of unsolicited manuscripts lay by the wall near the door, as if at need it could be used as a door-stop. The baby was in a silver frame on the desk, but massively enlarged on the wall by the door was Kelly, on her first entrance into the Dog and Whistle in
Waterloo Terrace.

It would have been a restless day for Maurice, even without the imminent arrival of the policemen from Yorkshire. Kelly was auditioning for
William and Annette,
the prestige series Midlands were filming in France in the New Year. She very much wanted the part, but Maurice wasn't at all sure she was right for it. On the other hand, as he freely admitted, Kelly continually surprised him, both in life and in her acting range. What was certainly true was that she would be nervous. He had told the policemen that their coming that day was convenient if they wanted to talk to Kelly as well, since she would be at the studios anyway, but in his heart he wondered if she would behave herself. Quicksilver in her changes of mood at the best of times, the audition would make her behavior totally unpredictable. She could do or say anything, act this or that role in her female repertoire. Surprise, continual stimulation, was one of the things about her that had first attracted him. But one thing was certain: when the subject of Lydia came up Kelly would use the word “cow.” She always did.

Maurice went over to the window to calm his nerves. Looking out over
Birmingham always calmed his nerves. It was so pre-eminently the city with nothing. Apart from the fact that Kelly was a child of it, and
Waterloo Terrace
a celebration of its people, Maurice would miss nothing about Birmingham. He would be happy—if the job came off—to be back in Yorkshire, particularly a Yorkshire without his aunt Lydia. Lydia had always represented an awkwardness for him, in particular an awkwardness with his parents. He never knew how explicitly he ought to acknowledge the harm she had done, the misery she had caused. Both he and they had shied away from the subject—as English people so often do shy away from discussing the most important things in their lives.

When his secretary showed the policemen in he was relaxed in his welcome. The secretary was instructed to get them all coffee, and while she was setting out cups he studied them both, casting them, as he so often did when he met new people, in soaps. The young black man was easy: he would be a sharp, street-wise hustler in
EastEnders.
If he couldn't act he would be no different from most of the “ethnic” actors in
EastEnders.
But Maurice was pretty sure he would be able to act. Perhaps he was acting now, as a policeman. The older one, Oddie, was harder to cast: a calm, rational, civilised sort of man. Perhaps he would make a suitable husband for one of the older women in
Waterloo Terrace.
Emily Braithwaite, perhaps, who was currently unattached, having gone through three husbands, in the manner of people who stayed a long time in soaps. He pulled himself back to reality as his secretary left the office. This was a serious matter. He must not go off wool-gathering when he needed all his wits about him. He looked at the older man expectantly.

“I can imagine your parents will have spoken to you,” Oddie said. “So we can dispense with the preliminaries.”

“Yes,” said Maurice nodding. “You want to know what I was doing around ten o'clock on the evening Lydia was killed.”

“Yes, though we're far from certain that was when she was killed. But can we go back further than that for a start? You went up to see your aunt on Saturday, I believe?”

Maurice grimaced. Oddie noticed a tightening of the muscles over his whole body, and a tension in the hands resting on the arms of his desk chair.

“That's right. It was rather expected of me, though I don't know why: we hadn't got any pleasure from each other's company for a very long time.”

“You went on your own?”

“Yes. I thought it would make for less friction. Anyway Kelly would never have come.”

“They didn't get on, your aunt and your wife?”

“Chalk and cheese. They'd only met once, but they both took an instant dislike to each other.”

“And was there less friction, with you on your own?”

Maurice had already decided on honesty. Quite probably Lydia had told the boys things hadn't gone well.

“No,” he said. “Not really, as it turned out. Somehow or other we rubbed each other up the wrong way.”

“Any particular reason, sir?”

“No. Everything just seemed to put us on a wrong footing. Her views on my job, memories of Gavin, the boys she was currently taking under her wing. . . . It may be that it all came back to them. That I saw she was starting to do with them what she had done years ago with Gavin and me.”

Mike Oddie nodded.

“Perhaps you could say something, then, about how you regarded your aunt—what your relationship was, then and now.”

Maurice again grimaced and thought for some seconds. His fingers drummed on the arm-rests, then self-consciously stopped.

“I suppose from her point of view I was damned ungrateful, as well as being unsatisfactory. And if you were compiling a ledger you would have to enter many things on the plus side: she taught us an awful lot, she enlarged our horizons, gave us a great feeling of our
potential
—too great for our talents, perhaps. Going up there was exciting, stretching. Gavin always said she was the person who made you feel you could really do something in the world.”

“He was the one most affected by her, wasn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And was still devoted to her, up to the time of his death?”

Maurice frowned.

“I suppose so . . . Gavin really enjoyed life, those last few years. He was attached to the Embassy in Washington—young, good-looking, with a glamorous uniform. He was having a whale of a time, and lots of love affairs. But his job was to do with arms sales, so he knew better than most what kind of a war the Falklands thing was going to be. You've seen that photograph of him that Lydia and my parents have, have you?”

“Yes.”

“In point of fact I gave Mum and Dad that copy, said he'd meant it for them. . . . But when he sent it, just after the Argentine troops invaded, he wrote: ‘I look at this chap and wonder whether it is me at all.' ”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

“That somehow he'd . . . taken a wrong turning. Got into something that wasn't really what he wanted to do at all, and wasn't right for.”

“Aren't you reading a lot into it?”

“Yes . . . I hate to think of Gavin being Lydia's boy right up to the end.”

“Did he know he was going to be involved in the war himself?”

“I think he had a shrewd idea. A day or two later he was called back to London, told he was going to be involved in PR and liaison with the press. He phoned me a few days before he sailed. I remember him saying: ‘I don't see
me
in this war. I just can't see what it has to do with me.' That's why I've always believed that he did get some feeling, before he died, that Lydia's influence had set him on the wrong path.”

“Did you say the subject of your brother was one of the things that you and your aunt argued about last Saturday?”

“He came up. I was foolish to let it. Lydia felt she had some kind of exclusive rights in Gavin.”

“You began to have doubts about your aunt, didn't you, a long time before your brother did—if he ever did have them?”

“Yes, I did. I don't remember when it was, but I know I was still at school.”

“Someone in the village suggested it was when you went on holiday with your parents to Portugal,” Charlie put in.

Maurice turned to him.

“Do you know, I think that could be right. How closely the whole thing must have been observed! . . . God, that holiday! We resented going, because we'd wanted to go with Lydia to see the Loire Valley castles. Looking back, I think Lydia dangled that prospect before us
after
she knew that Dad had booked for us all to go to Cascais. It was a deliberate trial of strength. And if she lost that one, I don't suppose it felt much like that to Mother and Father. We behaved disgustingly. We wouldn't swim, we said the food was ‘provincial' . . . God, we were little shits! But then we were pretty horrible to them much of the time—ignored them, put their opinions, their hopes for us in second place, or nowhere at all. . . . And then suddenly—and it could have been on that holiday, because I remember being much happier in the
second week—something hit me like a thunderbolt: ‘These are our parents,' I remember thinking. ‘It's our mother and father that we're doing this to.' I don't know how or why it happened. . . .”

“It's called growing up,” said Oddie.

“Right. I suppose that was it.” Maurice paused and meditated, putting the course of his own life in order in his mind. “Anyway, that was the beginning of the end of Lydia's influence over me.”

“Was it about then that she gave up the idea of grooming you for politics?” Charlie asked.

“That was rather earlier, as I remember,” said Maurice, his forehead creased. “By the time I . . . grew out of her she had had a series of vague ambitions for me, but they were nothing more than that: she was really taken up with Gavin. She was a one-man woman. But the politics thing illustrates something about Lydia: her plans and hopes bore very little relation to the person she made them for. Gavin could be moulded into the form of a dashing naval hero—though I always felt it was essentially a front, because in spite of his enjoying the Washington social life Gavin was really a loner. And you're never alone on a ship, are you? But Gavin passed muster, as I say. I was never going to pass muster as a politician. It wasn't me at all. I didn't enjoy speaking in public, I had no political convictions one way or the other, and still haven't, I simply wasn't outgoing enough. At best I'd have been an uneasy, Edward-Heath-like figure. But Lydia decided the nation needed saving, so I was to be the nation's saviour. They were essentially plans for herself—for herself through me. It was ridiculous.”

“Do you think Mrs Perceval had relationships with adolescents rather than men because she wanted to mould them?”

“Yes. I can say that now, of course. I couldn't see it at the time.”

“She liked playing God?”

“Yes. Even with the marriage to Jamie: people say it came about because she couldn't get Robert, and I'm sure that's true, but the other thing was she thought she could mould him. The give and take of really adult relationships wasn't in her: she had to give, make, others had to take, be made. And she found she couldn't mould Jamie. I remember her saying once: ‘He was like jelly in my hands.' That's the only time I remember her talking about her marriage.”

“Do you think she continued to love Robert?” Charlie asked.

Maurice nodded his head.

“In her way. I'm not sure ‘love' is the word I'd use. She talked about him
a lot, played up what he was doing—because a lot of the treks and endurance feats he went in for didn't amount to a great deal. She always made sure he had a letter with all the family news when he came through or came out. I don't suppose he gave a monkey's fart for family news. He hardly ever came up North, hardly ever visited his parents, I believe. Yes, in a way he was still a hero to Lydia. But she loved Gavin.”