A Murder of Quality (2 page)

‘When I look back on my thirty years at Carne, I realise I have achieved rather less than a road sweeper.’ They were watching him now – ‘I used to regard a road sweeper as a person inferior to myself. Now, I rather doubt it. Something is dirty, he makes it clean, and the state of the world is advanced. But I – what have
I
done? Entrenched a ruling class which is distinguished by neither talent, culture, nor wit; kept alive for one more generation the distinctions of a dead age.’

Charles Hecht, who had never perfected the art of not listening to Fielding, grew red and fussed at the other end of the table.

‘Don’t we teach them, Fielding? What about our successes, our scholarships?’

‘I have never taught a boy in my life, Charles. Usually the boy wasn’t clever enough; occasionally, I wasn’t. In most boys, you see, perception dies with puberty. In a few it persists, though where we find it we take good care at Carne to kill it. If it survives our efforts the boy wins a scholarship … Bear with me, Shane; it’s my last Half.’

‘Last Half or not, you’re talking through your hat, Fielding,’ said Hecht, angrily.

‘That is traditional at Carne. These successes, as you call them, are the failures, the rare boys who have not learnt the lessons of Carne. They have ignored the cult of mediocrity. We can do nothing for them. But for the rest, for the puzzled little clerics and the blind little soldiers, for them the truth of Carne is written on the wall, and they hate us.’

Hecht laughed rather heavily.

‘Why do so many come back, then, if they hate us so much? Why do they remember us and come and see us?’

‘Because we, dear Charles, are the writing on the wall! The one lesson of Carne they never forget. They come back to read
us
, don’t you see? It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realised that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.’ Fielding put his head back and gazed at the clumsy Victorian moulding on the ceiling, and the halo of dirt round the light rose.

‘We just got a little older. We made the same jokes, thought the same thoughts, wanted the same things. Year in, year out, Hecht, we were the same people, not wiser, not better; we haven’t had an original thought between us for the last fifty years of our lives. They saw what a trick it all was, Carne and us: our academic dress, our school-room jokes, our wise little offerings of guidance. And that’s why they come back year after year of their puzzled, barren lives to gaze fascinated at you and me, Hecht, like children at a grave, searching for the secret of life and death. Oh, yes, they have learned
that
from us.’

Hecht looked at Fielding in silence for a moment.

‘Decanter, Hecht?’ said Fielding, in a slightly conciliatory way, but Hecht’s eyes were still upon him.

‘If that’s a joke …’ he began, and his wife observed with satisfaction that he was very angry indeed.

‘I wish I knew, Charles,’ Fielding replied with apparent earnestness. ‘I really wish I knew. I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.’ He rather liked that.

They had coffee in the drawing-room, where Fielding resorted to gossip, but Hecht was not to be drawn. Fielding rather wished he had let him light his pipe. Then he recalled his vision of the Hechts in Paris, and it restored him. He had been rather good this evening. There were moments when he convinced himself.

While Shane fetched her coat, the two men stood together in the hall, but neither spoke. Shane returned, an ermine stole, yellow with age, draped over her great white shoulders. She inclined her head to the right, smiled and held out her hand to Fielding, the fingers down.

‘Terence, darling,’ she said, as Fielding kissed her fat knuckles; ‘so kind. And in your last Half. You must dine with us before you go. So sad. So few of us left.’ She smiled again, half closing her eyes to indicate emotional disturbance, then followed her husband into the street. It was still bitterly cold and snow was in the air.

Fielding closed and carefully bolted the door behind them – perhaps a fraction earlier than courtesy required – and returned to the dining-room. Hecht’s port glass was still about half full. Fielding picked it up and carefully poured the contents back into the decanter. He hoped Hecht wasn’t too upset; he hated people to dislike him. He snuffed the black candles and damped their wicks between his forefinger and thumb. Switching on the light, he took from the sideboard a sixpenny notebook, and opened it. It contained his list of dining guests for the remainder of the Half. With his fountain pen he placed a neat tick against the name Hecht. They were done. On Wednesday he would have the Rodes. The husband was quite good value, but she, of course, was hell … It was not always the way with married couples. The wives as a rule were so much more sympathetic.

He opened the sideboard and took from it a bottle of brandy and a tumbler. Holding them both in the same hand, he shuffled wearily back to the drawing-room, resting his other hand on the wall as he went. God! He felt old, suddenly; that thin line of pain across the chest, that heaviness in the legs and feet. Such an effort being with people – on stage all the time. He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep. Some German poet had said that; he’d quoted it once, ‘You may sleep but I must dance.’ Something like that.

‘That’s how I am,’ thought Fielding. ‘That’s how Carne is, too; an old satyr dancing to the music.’ The music grew faster and their bodies older, but they must dance on – there were young men waiting in the wings. It had been funny once dancing the old dances in a new world. He poured himself some more brandy. He’d be pleased to leave in a way, even though he’d have to go on teaching somewhere else.

But it had its beauty, Carne … The Abbey Close in spring … the flamingo figures of boys waiting for the ritual of worship … the ebb and flow of children, like the seasons of the year, and the old men dying among them. He wished he could paint; he would paint the pageant of Carne in the fallow browns of autumn … What a shame, thought Fielding, that a mind so perceptive of beauty had no talent for creation.

He looked at his watch. Quarter to twelve. Nearly time to go out … to dance, and not to sleep.

2 The Thursday Feeling

It was Thursday evening and the
Christian Voice
had just been put to bed. This was scarcely a historic event in Fleet Street. The pimply boy from Dispatch who took away the ragged pile of page-proofs showed no more ceremony than was strictly demanded by the eventual prospect of his Christmas bonus. And even in this respect he had learned that the secular journals of Unipress were more provident of material charity than the
Christian Voice
; charity being in strict relationship to circulation.

Miss Brimley, the journal’s editor, adjusted the air cushion beneath her and lit a cigarette. Her secretary and sub-editor – the appointment carried both responsibilities – yawned, dropped the aspirin bottle into her handbag, combed out her ginger hair and bade Miss Brimley good night, leaving behind her as usual the smell of strongly scented powder and an empty paper-tissue box. Miss Brimley listened contentedly to the clipping echo of her footsteps as it faded down the corridor. It pleased her to be alone at last, tasting the anticlimax. She never failed to wonder at herself, how every Thursday morning brought the same slight uneasiness as she entered the vast Unipress building and stood a little absurdly on one escalator after the other, like a drab parcel on a luxury liner. Heaven knows, she had run the
Voice
for fourteen years, and there were those who said its layout was the best thing Unipress did. Yet the Thursday feeling never left her, the wakeful anxiety that one day, perhaps today, they wouldn’t be ready when the dispatch boy came. She often wondered what would happen then. She had heard of failures elsewhere in that vast combine, of features disapproved and staff rebuked. It was a mystery to her why they kept the
Voice
at all, with its expensive room on the seventh floor and a circulation which, if Miss Brimley knew anything, hardly paid for the paper-clips.

The
Voice
had been founded at the turn of the century by old Lord Landsbury, together with a Nonconformist daily newspaper and the
Temperance Gazette
. But the
Gazette
and the daily were long since dead, and Landsbury’s son had woken one morning not long ago to find his whole business and every man and woman of it, every stick of furniture, ink, paper-clips, and galley-pins, bought by the hidden gold of Unipress.

That was three years ago and every day she had waited for her dismissal. But it never came; no directive, no question, no word. And so, being a sensible woman, she continued exactly as before and ceased to wonder.

And she was glad. It was easy to sneer at the
Voice
. Every week it offered humbly and without fanfares evidence of the Lord’s intervention in the world’s affairs, retold in simple and somewhat unscientific terms the early history of the Jews, and provided over a fictitious signature motherly advice to whomever should write and ask for it. The
Voice
scarcely concerned itself with the fifty-odd millions of the population who had never heard of it. It was a family affair, and rather than abuse those who were not members, it did its best for those who were. For them it was kind, optimistic, and informative. If a million children were dying of the plague in India, you may be sure that the weekly editorial described the miraculous escape from fire of a Methodist family in Kent. The
Voice
did not advise you how to disguise the encroaching wrinkles round your eyes, or control your spreading figure; did not dismay you, if you were old, by its own eternal youth. It was itself middle-aged and middle class, counselled caution to girls and charity to all. Nonconformity is the most conservative of habits and families which took the
Voice
in 1903 continued to take it in 1960.

Miss Brimley was not quite the image of her journal. The fortunes of war and the caprice of Intelligence work had thrown her into partnership with the younger Lord Landsbury, and for the six years of war they had worked together efficiently and inconspicuously in an unnamed building in Knightsbridge. The fortunes of peace rendered both unemployed, but Landsbury had the good sense, as well as the generosity, to offer Miss Brimley a job. The
Voice
had ceased publication during the war, and no one seemed anxious to renew it. At first Miss Brimley had felt a little ashamed at reviving and editing a journal which in no way expressed her own vague deism, but quite soon, as the touching letters came in and the circulation recovered, she developed an affection for her job – and for her readers – which outweighed her earlier misgivings. The
Voice
was her life and its readers her preoccupation. She struggled to answer their odd, troubled questions, sought advice of others where she could not provide it herself, and, in time, under a handful of pseudonyms, became, if not their philosopher, their guide, friend, and universal aunt.

Miss Brimley put out her cigarette, absently tidied the pins, paper-clips, scissors, and paste into the top right-hand drawer of her desk, and gathered together the afternoon mail from her in-tray which, because it was Thursday, she had left untouched. There were several letters addressed to Barbara Fellowship, under which name the
Voice
had, since its foundation, answered both privately and through its published columns the many problems of its correspondents. They could wait until tomorrow. She rather enjoyed the ‘problem post’, but Friday morning was when she read it. She opened the little filing cabinet at her elbow and dropped the letters into a box file at the front of the compartment. As she did so, one of them fell on its back and she noticed with surprise that the sealed flap was embossed with an elegant blue dolphin. She picked the envelope out of the cabinet and looked at it curiously, turning it over several times. It was of pale grey paper, very faintly lined. Expensive – perhaps handmade. Beneath the dolphin was a tiny scroll on which she could just discern the legend
Regem defendere diem videre
. The postmark was Carne, Dorset. That must be the school crest. But why was Carne familiar to her? Miss Brimley was proud of her memory, which was excellent, and she was vexed when it failed her. As a last resort she opened the envelope with her faded ivory paper knife and read the letter.

Dear Miss Fellowship
,

I don’t know if you are a real person but it doesn’t matter, because you always give such good, kind answers. It was me who wrote last June about the pastry mix. I am not mad and I know my husband is trying to kill me. Could I please come and see you as soon as it’s convenient? I’m sure you’ll believe me, and understand that I am normal. Could it be
as soon as possible,
please, I am so afraid of the long nights. I don’t know who else to turn to. I could try Mr Cardew at the Tabernacle but he wouldn’t believe me and Dad’s too sensible. I might as well be dead. There’s something not quite right about him. At night sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep he just lies watching the darkness. I know it’s wrong to think such wicked things and have fear in our hearts, but I can’t help it
.

I hope you don’t get many letters like this
.

Yours faithfully,
Stella Rode (Mrs)
nèe Glaston

She sat quite still at her desk for a moment, looking at the address in handsome blue engraving at the top of the page: ‘North Fields, Carne School, Dorset.’ In that moment of shock and astonishment one phrase forced itself upon her mind. ‘The value of intelligence depends on its breeding.’ That was John Landsbury’s favourite dictum. Until you know the pedigree of the information you cannot evaluate a report. Yes, that was what he used to say: ‘We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage.’ And she used to reply: ‘Yes, John, but even the best families had to begin somewhere.’