The Herring in the Library (2 page)

Then, for a while, we heard nothing of him at all. Only later did his apotheosis become apparent. He had descended on the City when the main academic requirements were a pair of red braces and
brash confidence. One he had already. The other he had bought, presumably, at a tailor’s in Docklands. As time went by, we sometimes caught a brief mention of him in the national press. The
college newsletter increasingly called upon him for short articles on life after university or to encourage us to give generously to some appeal for a new boathouse or scholarships for overseas
students – each successive accompanying photograph showed him slightly plumper, slightly greyer, distinctly more pleased with himself. The articles on life after university at least showed no
false modesty. If the Queen had been hoping to surprise Shagger, she would have needed to give him a lot more than a knighthood.

‘Congratulations,’ I said again. Then I added: ‘Oddly enough, I get reminded of you quite often round here. There’s a big house nearby called—’

‘—Muntham Court,’ he said.

‘You know it?’

‘Know it, seen it, bought it.’

‘That’s a—’

‘—coincidence? Not really. The missus rather fancied being Lady Muntham of Muntham Court. So I got it to oblige. We’ll keep the house in Chelsea too.’

‘As one does,’ I said.

‘Yes, Ethelred,’ he said, without his lip even inching towards a grin. ‘As one does.’

I switched off the smile and tried to think who Lady Muntham might be. Could he still be with the girl he was going out with at university? ‘So, you married Harriet?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘Clever of you to remember. But she’s not Lady Muntham. God forbid. Harriet and I parted company a while back. I later married
Annabelle
en secondes
noces,
as they say. I’m not sure which was more expensive: the divorce or the celebrity wedding that Annabelle wanted.’

‘A cheap divorce then,’ I said. But Shagger failed to find this amusing either.

‘No, Ethelred,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a cheap divorce.’

His attention seemed to be focused for a moment on some distant object. Then, turning back to me, he said: ‘Didn’t you marry Geraldine? She was at that secretarial
college.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we also got divorced. It happens. She later went and lived with Rupert Mackinnon. You remember Rupert?’ Rupert too had been a contemporary at
college.

Shagger nodded. ‘She got around a bit, your Geraldine,’ he said. ‘Still, I’m sure you discovered that.’

I shook my head. Other than her getting into bed with my former best friend – the sort of slip-up anyone might make – I had no reason to doubt Geraldine’s fidelity.

‘Got around? No, it was just Rupert,’ I said.

Shagger’s mouth started to form a lopsided smirk, as if I was attempting to be funny, but then a large green Jaguar drove past us doing about fifteen miles an hour. His face fell
instantly. The car hesitated briefly at the crossroads before turning right at the Gun. The driver appeared to flash a quick glance in our direction, then the Jaguar shot forward. We heard it
proceeding, rapidly but now out of sight, up School Hill and back towards the roundabout.

Shagger scowled after it. I assumed that, like many people these days, he disapproved of large, polluting cars.

‘He looked lost,’ I said.

‘No, he knows exactly where he’s going,’ said Shagger.

I, in turn, started a polite smile to acknowledge what I assumed was an obscure joke on Shagger’s part, but whatever he had meant by it, it was not a pleasantry. My grin faded without it
having been registered, still less returned. Shagger seemed to be listening to the fading noise of the engine as the climate criminal progressed onto the ring road, merging with the late-afternoon
traffic.

His momentary preoccupation at least gave me a chance to take in this man I had not seen for so many years – or at least, not in the flesh. Thinking back to the last photograph I had seen
of him, though, I realized he had lost a little weight. The glossy self-satisfaction that had dissuaded me, and probably many others, from contributing to whichever good cause he happened to be
promoting was less evident. And there was grey around his eyes, I noticed, as well as in his hair. Still, he looked prosperous enough. The tweed jacket was well cut, new and in all likelihood from
Savile Row. The trousers were pressed to a military perfection. His brown brogues shone like old mahogany. He carried his tweed cap well for somebody who came from a generation that had largely
abandoned headgear of any sort. One might have said that he was attempting to caricature the dress of the local squire if it were not for the fact that he had just become the local squire. My
local squire. I wondered whether I could risk inviting a man with the biggest house in the village and a few million pounds’ worth of real estate in Chelsea back to my own modest flat.
Possibly not.

‘So, do you live round here?’ he asked.

I indicated Greypoint House on the opposite side of the irregular, though rather pretty, square that forms the centre of our village. Two ancient pubs, a post office, a quaint supermarket, a
butcher’s shop, an ex-farmhouse of uncertain age and my own humble residence, all masking the sea of comfortable modern bungalows that now makes up most of Findon. Shagger acknowledged it
with a nod. ‘Not a bad little place,’ he said, taking in the grey, double-fronted Georgian facade, its bay windows, its lilac tree and its low flint garden wall. ‘Writing is
obviously reasonably profitable then?’

‘My bit of it is those two windows up there,’ I said. ‘It’s all flats now.’

‘Such a shame,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t really be allowed to mess around with old houses like that.’

The last distant notes of the Jaguar’s engine had long since faded away. I was about to touch my forelock and take my leave when Shagger suddenly said: ‘Well, behind that bay window
must be a very pleasant sitting room, and behind that sitting room there must be a well-stocked kitchen with a kettle and a jar of coffee. I suppose you’ve no plans to invite me
back?’

Briefly I felt like Mole being addressed, and slightly patronized, by Ratty. I tried to remember whether I’d left a bucket of whitewash in the hallway . . . or was that Badger?

‘Yes, do come back for a coffee,’ I said. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do.’

‘What could I have better to do than have coffee with an old chum? Lead on, Macduff,’ he said.

I wondered whether to correct his Shakespearean quotation, but, concluding that Shagger might not yet have heard of Shakespeare, I simply indicated the way. Shagger strode ahead, his hands
behind his back, the well-loved squire walking at a measured pace and in very shiny shoes through his new village.

That was the first of a number of such meetings. Our relations with people often fall into patterns that are almost unique to them, without seeming in any way out of the
ordinary. In Robert’s case (I quickly ceased to think of him as ‘Shagger’) the pattern proved to be that he would drop in without warning, whenever he ventured into the village
for a newspaper or some other minor purchase. He expected me to be at home, as indeed I usually was – we third-rate writers don’t get out that much. Robert and I would have coffee and
he would talk about our time at university or his time in the City. I was occasionally allowed to contribute to his narrative – for example to remind him how narrowly and unfairly he had
missed a boxing blue or to tease him gently about his success with women or capacity for drinking beer. I often envied his gift of partial recall. Once when talking about academic matters he
mentioned in passing that it was a shame he had missed getting a first – that he had also missed getting a second apparently troubled him less.

He would ask occasionally about my books, but was always satisfied with the briefest of answers. Often they were the same answers I had given him the previous week. We rarely trespassed very far
into the present. Even the past seemed to stop short at the day he had left the bank.

‘It was time to go, Ethelred,’ he said, one day when our conversation had fleetingly edged up to that point and then backed abruptly away. ‘You have to know when it’s
time to go. No point in lingering.’ And the conversation had reverted to a rugby match against Teddy Hall in which Robert had (he reminded me) played a starring role.

But why it had been time to go and what would have happened had he lingered were topics that were always skilfully sidestepped.

‘You’re lucky to have this little place,’ he said more than once. ‘Everything you want to hand. No gardens requiring continuous maintenance by expensive staff. No dry rot
hiding in the cellar. Just a snug little bolthole.’

‘Bolthole from what, Robert?’ I asked. ‘This is what I have. This is it.’

‘Capital little place, all the same,’ he said, taking in most of the flat in a single glance.

Again, I felt I was being patronized, but perhaps justifiably so. I could, as Elsie had tactfully pointed out, scarcely claim even to be a second-rate crime writer. I had a bank balance that was
entirely appropriate to my literary status. Robert had, for a time, run one of the biggest financial institutions in the City. He could afford to retire – grey-haired and with the beginnings
of a stoop perhaps, but still a relatively young man. He was Sir Robert Muntham KCBE of Muntham Court. I wasn’t.

Part of the pattern too was that his wife did not join him on these visits. It was several weeks before I met her. Annabelle proved to be some years younger than he was – an elegant and
rather tense woman, who (I was later told) had had a reasonably successful career as a model before settling down and not having children. I’m not sure our first meeting was a success.

‘This is Ethelred, one of my very oldest chums,’ Robert had said, when the three of us happened to coincide outside the post office one morning.

‘You live here – in Findon?’ she asked, suggesting that Robert had not mentioned his chum much, if at all, on his return with
The Times
or a tube of toothpaste.

‘I have a flat over there,’ I said, anxious to avoid any repetition of the error that Robert had fallen into. ‘It’s just a couple of rooms up on the first
floor.’

She looked from me to the flat and then back again. ‘That must be very . . .’ she said. But she was unable to come up with any advantages to living in a small flat just outside
Worthing. ‘So, what do you do, Alfred?’ she asked.

‘Ethelred,’ I said. ‘As for what I do, I am a writer.’

‘I
thought
you said “Ethelred”, but then I decided I must have misheard. Do you write under your own name – no, surely not?’

I told her the three names that I wrote under.

‘I don’t think I’ve read any of your books,’ she said. It’s a response I’m used to. Really, it doesn’t bother me any more. ‘What do you
write?’ she added.

‘Crime mainly – as J. R. Elliot and Peter Fielding anyway. When I’m being Amanda Collins I write romantic fiction.’

She shook her head. She hadn’t heard of any of me. ‘So, do you write hard-boiled crime?’

‘Not really. My victims die almost painlessly and usually with the minimum of blood to clean up afterwards.’

‘Is that realistic?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, I must read one of your books anyway. Which do you recommend?’

I named a couple at random. Other than that the J. R. Elliot books are set in the fourteenth century and the Peter Fielding books in the present day, they’re all much of a muchness.

‘I hope you remember those titles, Robert,’ she said to her husband.

Robert winked at me before saying: ‘Of course, dearest.’

At that point Lady Muntham recalled that she needed to get some steak from the butcher but, before she set out on the fifty yards or so of road that separated us from Peckham’s, she added:
‘You must come and have dinner with us, Ethelred.’

I acknowledged, with a thin smile, a promise that I did not expect would ever be honoured. Then, a couple of weeks later a gilt-edged card arrived. When I next saw Robert, I apologized for the
fact that I had invited my agent down to stay that weekend and so would be unable to attend.

Which was how I ended up sitting in my flat with Elsie discussing evening wear.

‘Come on, Tressider,’ she said. ‘Or we’re going to be late for Lord Snooty and his pals. I don’t know what you were thinking about but you were miles away there.
You’ve got to do five hundred words before dinner. No flashbacks.’

‘I always end up writing flashbacks,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of writer I am.’

At
Muntham Court

‘Come closer to the fire, Master Thomas.’

‘The fire? Thank you, my lady. You are kind. Very kind.
Too kind.’

Yes, decidedly, just that little bit too kind, thought Master Thomas, inching closer as instructed, but no further than politeness dictated. The heat from this blaze was uncomfortable, even
in January. Nevertheless, he rubbed his small, soft hands in front of it. Well-seasoned logs from the estate had had the snow dusted from them and had been piled by liveried serving men into the
vast stone fireplace. The flames now leapt upwards into the cavernous, soot-crusted chimney, seemingly as eager to please Her Ladyship as everyone else who came in contact with her.

Clever things, these chimneys. Thomas, like most people, had grown up in a house where smoke escaped through a blackened hole in the roof, to the extent that it escaped at all. Now everyone
was building houses with chimneys. That was modern times for you. And who knew what wonders the fifteenth century might bring?

‘Sharing the fire with you makes it no less warm for me,’ said the lady. ‘And you have had a long and cold journey from London.’

‘The radiance of your welcome warmed me the moment I stepped across your threshold, my lady. No fire needed. None at all. Not a single log. Scarcely even a twig.’

‘Are you a flatterer, Master Thomas, because you are a poet or because you are a courtier?’

The problem, thought Master Thomas, was that he was unable to have a conversation with this lady without babbling like an inhabitant of the Bethlehem Hospital. Still, it was a good question:
poet or courtier? Both would be better than the day job.