A Murder in Mayfair (19 page)

“Lucy Mariotti had twins.”

H
ow did you know?” I asked at last, my mind having in the silence since his news broke conducted a swift rearrangement of my mental landscape. “Did Lucy tell you?”

He shook his head vigorously.

“I told you I never saw or spoke to Lucy after she moved out of our house. No, it was your mother who told me. She'd resigned from her job, but she came to see me the day before she and Claud and the baby moved to Milton. The baby, of course, was a deadly secret, but I knew, and though I could see she begrudged me the ten minutes she spent away from him—you—to come to see me and thank me, she did acknowledge that I'd earned it, and I was happy to see her. She said you had transformed their lives, and I'm sure that was true. In fact, you could
see
it. I was surprised none of her colleagues in the office commented on the fact that she was a changed woman.”

“Why did she mention Lucy having had twins?”

“I suppose because Lucy had. When she handed you over she told them, and added: ‘Luckily I had a would-be parent in reserve.' Your mother was quite indignant. ‘Did she think we were going to go back on the agreement?' she asked. ‘It's the last thing we would have done. It's as if she didn't trust us.'”

“My poor mother,” I said, going over in my mind examples of her beautiful naïveté about the wickednesses of the world. “She would never have been able to comprehend what Lucy had actually been contemplating doing.”

“No, your mother always thought the best of people if that was possible. Though I remember her saying too, that last time I saw her: ‘I wish she'd offered us both the boys, because I wouldn't trust her to be sure she'd found a really suitable home for the other little one.' All this was said
sotto voce
in my office in the English Department, with both of us behaving like gunpowder plotters.”

I thought for a moment.

“Is that all the evidence there is for my being a twin? Because she could have been making it up—a nasty joke to twist the knife in a little.”

He'd lived with this much longer than me, and thought it through.

“Oh, I don't think so. The fact of her having two is the only explanation for her not having tried to get more out of your mother and father. I'm sure she was intending to do that, but the second baby meant she could double the sum anyway. And Patrick Marryott mentioned it too, fairly obliquely. We met at a conference somewhere or other, and though I'd very much rather not have talked to him, he came up during the coffee break one morning. ‘Wasn't Lucy a clever girl?' he said in his usual sneering way. ‘Solved all the problems and maximized her profits without burdening your old-fashioned Liberal conscience.' ‘All the problems except the babies',' I said. He shrugged. ‘Oh, they'll be all right,' he said. ‘Children with their natural parents often have far worse prospects of happiness.' Which was true, but totally irrelevant. I always felt strongly about that. When Hayden-Gryce's death was in the papers—in the late seventies it was—I thought, ‘Well, that's
one of them out of the way who will have made his life hell.' I asked Marryott if Lucy was working at her research with him, and he said: ‘Oh no. She's pursuing her researches in quite a different field.' ‘What field is that?' I asked. He chuckled. The same field as the respected Dr. Kinsey,' he replied, and the chuckle turned into a roar of laughter and he went off.”

“Who is or was Dr. Kinsey?” I asked.

“You're too young to remember the fuss his books stirred up soon after the war,” Simon Frere said. “I think the best word to describe him is ‘sexologist.' I took him to mean that she was using her undoubted charms and attractions—maybe as someone's mistress. A rich person's definitely.”

“That sounds pretty likely.”

Simon Frere had put down his cup, refused a refill, and had begun to make preparations for departure. The restaurant was still sparsely filled, and our table was remote from any other diners, which had made our talk much easier.

“I won't say I've enjoyed our session,” Frere said, “but it has been therapeutic. On the other hand I don't think I'll want to go back over the events we've talked about too much in the future. I was at least cured of any desire to play God by them, or try to cure the miseries of this mortal coil. I don't think I come at all well out of things, and I'd rather put them behind me. The ball is now in your court, and it's up to you whether you decide to play it or not.”

“Personally I'm very glad you did try to cure the miseries of this mortal coil,” I said.

“But remember you could have been the one who was sold to the Hayden-Gryces. Now, is there anything else you want to ask me about? Then I can put it all behind me, as I'm afraid I put you behind me thirty-five years ago.”

I thought.

“I've always been puzzled why Lucy didn't have an abortion
the moment she found out she was pregnant. That would have been perfectly possible then, wouldn't it, even if it was illegal?”

“Perfectly possible, particularly with the Revill connections. She would hardly have needed to go backstreet to get rid of Lord John's child. Actually, I did ask her.”

“What did she say?”

“Said she couldn't contemplate it because she was a Catholic.”

“Hmm. Did you believe her?”

“I did not. It was the sort of tricky, dishonest thing she would say, daring you to scoff and then putting you down. I think the baby was a weapon she could use against Lord John—either to get money or marriage or whatever out of him, or to get him bad publicity. Of course after the murder the police were investigating her for some time, and she certainly couldn't have done anything illegal in that time. Probably by the time she was cleared in their eyes the possibility of a safe abortion no longer existed. Lucy certainly wouldn't have done anything that might have involved risk to herself.”

“You said you were a tough nut she was practicing on. Practicing for what?”

For the first time he looked sour.

“There are many varieties of whore and grades of whoredom. I don't pretend to know where Lucy Mariotti landed up, but it will certainly have been some variety of whore, whether amateur or professional. That was her aim, and that will have been her destination.”

I nodded. That did seem to me likely. I fumbled for my wallet and went to pay the bill. As I was at the counter I heard the door go, and when I turned back Simon Frere had vanished—back, no doubt to the redbrick bibliophile's palace beside St. Pancras Station. My car was waiting for me outside, and the
official driver's mood lightened perceptibly the farther we got from the dangerous seediness of the King's Cross area.

 • • • 

The following weekend I got through my constituency business as planned by teatime on Saturday, and I took the train back to London. I felt I needed a free Sunday to clear my head, to sort out the implications of the new facts that Frere had laid out for me: the details of the transaction by which I had become Colin Pinnock, and the fact that I had, or had had, a twin brother. I decided over breakfast to have an hour or two in the Tate—something I like doing in those little pockets of free time I've had since I came to live in London: I decide on two or three rooms, and do them thoroughly, helped by the fact that there are some rooms I never consider doing, and by the fact that the arrangement of the whole gallery is more flexible than it used to be, and the pictures are changed more frequently.

The phone call came about nine-fifteen. I could think of no one apart from Susan who might ring me up at that time on a Sunday, and my finger was on the “record” switch of my tape recorder as I took up the receiver. This time it was an aria I knew: the soprano aria
“La Mamma Morta”
from
Andrea Chénier
(an opera I've seen three or four times, mainly to enjoy the belting-it-out-to-the-heavens duet at the end, with the protagonists in a tumbrel on the way to the guillotine). My persecutor cut the duet short, and it was followed by the laughter of Don Pasquale and Malatesta at the end of their patter-duet.

I remained perfectly cool. If it was the purpose of these calls to disturb and disorientate me, they had stopped working. I went to my complete set and checked the words of the aria in the libretto. Nothing seemed to be of relevance to me, beyond the fact that the soprano starts by talking about her mother's death, and my adoptive mother was dead—possibly my natural
mother as well, granted that she seemed to enjoy living dangerously. I was now registering a new fact: all the records played seemed old—scratchy and boxy. Much-played LPs, perhaps, or even 78s, with singers whose voices I did not recognize.

Try as I might I could make little of this, beyond the fact that my persecutor could be someone who scavenged in street markets and car boot sales for operatic records with “Mother” in them. No doubt next time it would be
“Mamma, quel vino etc.”
from
Cav
—with about as much relevance as the previous ones. Was this person anxious to alert me to the word “mother” because he/she knew I was investigating my parentage, or to stimulate my interest in doing so?

It was twenty to ten. I could be at the Tate for its opening. I locked my door carefully, went out into the nippy fresh air, and began toward the river. Ahead was a demolition site, which only last year had been a thirties block of Council flats. The scaffolding towered six or seven stories high, and it was as I was starting on the pavement edge outside it that I felt a sudden stab of alarm. I immediately looked up, and was conscious of a large shape, or two shapes close together making an indistinct mass, on the wooden slats of the third floor at the far corner of the building. The next thing I registered was a brick coming in my direction. It landed on the pavement several yards in front of me. Even if I had continued walking it would have been well off target. I turned, registered the light Sunday morning traffic, and dashed across to the other side of the street. From there I had a fair view of the site and the half-demolished block of flats. There was no sign of anyone, not even a disappearing back. I gave up any idea of investigating or giving chase. I had no wish in any case to be the target of more, better-aimed bricks. Cooler reflection, as I stood there in the chilly morning sun, suggested that a brick that landed that far ahead of me
had not been meant to hit, merely to frighten or to warn. It wasn't something to take seriously. Yet.

As I resumed my walk to the river I thought I could make a good guess at who had done the throwing. I was beginning to get an idea too as to what his relationship to me might be.

My mind wasn't on the forties abstract painters that day, nor even on Stanley Spencer. Often I have a meal at the Tate when I make these visits, but that day I just had a cup of tea and a bun, then took a taxi back home. I kept my eyes skinned on the people outside the Tate and the people in the streets on the journey home, but I got no sight of the slack-jawed young man.

I reported both the phone call and the brick to the police at the Palace of Westminster, who received my report with their usual barely suppressed skepticism. I record that here only because the incident with the brick was in fact the turning point, the moment when the psychological pressure became a real physical threat. Even the Westminster police, eventually, had to take notice. I rang Susan the following evening with a couple of things I wanted her to do. I could have rung Frieda Brewer, particularly as one of the things concerned Professor Marryott, whom she had actually met. I told myself I was closer to Susan, wanted to keep touch, but looking at my reactions to my dinner with Frieda I realize now that I had been repelled by her determination to bring up a child entirely on her own terms. Coming from a small but conventional family unit I found it a distasteful decision—cold and egotistical. The child was secondary, her creation, and perhaps mainly her plaything. I reacted to her desire to have a child without any paternal strings attached to it roughly as I would to a couple who wanted a blond-haired, blue-eyed child, and who had a tame scientist in tow who could supply it.

One thing I could say about my upbringing was that I was
never secondary. Another thing was that I was decidedly not a mail-order child, but one who was accepted as what I was, with all sorts of unpropitious factors in my background taken totally in my parents' stride. Again and again I had felt during this unexpected journey to my origins how lucky I had been. Professor Frere's remark, though, struck a chill: I could have been the other twin.

“Susan, I've got a couple of jobs for you,” I said.

“Good. I like to keep busy, especially on this little job, which I'm enjoying. I thought you might have been seduced into employing the American's researcher.”

“Too high-powered and inhuman. You know how that scares a man.”

“True. Being high-powered is aphrodisiacal, except when it's a woman who's high-powered.”

“I don't know that that's true, on reflection. Think of all those male politicians who claimed to find Mrs. Thatcher sexy. Anyway, I await Ms. Brewer's bill with trepidation, and return to my first love—research wise, I mean. The first subject of investigation is Professor Marryott.”

“Oh, he was mentioned in Elmore Hasselbank's article, wasn't he? One of Lucy's academic friends.”

“That's right. And probably much more to her taste than the one I talked to last week—Simon Frere. A nice man, and a man with a conscience. Reverse those two descriptions and I suspect what you'd get would be Professor Marryott. He was a professor of English Literature at University College, London. I say ‘was' because he's died since Hasselbank's article appeared. I'd like to know anything about him, but particularly if he has a widow.”