The Murder Room (7 page)

Emma laughed. “No, he won't arrive with flowers, and if he did they wouldn't be red roses.”

They had reached the war memorial at the end of Station Road. On his decorated plinth the statue of the young warrior strode with magnificent insouciance to his death. When Emma's father had been Master of his college, her nurse would take her and her sister for walks in the nearby botanical garden. On the way home they would make a short diversion so that the children could obey the nurse's injunction to wave to the soldier. The nurse, a widow of the Second World War, had long been dead, as were Emma's mother and sister. Only her father, living his solitary life among his books in a mansion flat in Marylebone, remained of the family. But Emma never passed the memorial without the pang of guilt that she no longer waved. Irrationally it seemed a wilful disrespect for more than the war dead generations.

On the station platform lovers were already indulging in their protracted goodbyes. Several couples strolled hand in hand. Another, the girl pressed hard against the waiting-room wall, looked as motionless as if they had been glued together.

Emma said suddenly, “Doesn't the very thought of it bore you, the sexual merry-go-round?”

“Meaning?”

“The modern mating ritual. You know how it is. You've probably seen more of it in London than I have here. Girl meets boy. They fancy each other. They go to bed, sometimes after the first date. It either works out and they become a recognized couple or it doesn't. Sometimes it ends the following morning when she sees the state of the bathroom, the difficulty of getting him out of bed to go to work and his obvious acceptance that she'll be the one to squeeze the oranges and make the coffee. If it works out he eventually moves in with her. It's usually that way round, isn't it? Have you ever met a case where she moves in with him?”

Clara said, “Maggie Foster moved in with her chap. You probably don't know her. Read maths at King's and got a two-one. But it's generally believed that Greg's flat was more convenient for his work and he couldn't be bothered to rehang his eighteenth-century water-colours.”

“All right, I'll give you Maggie Foster. So they move in together. That too either works out or it doesn't, only the split, of course, is messier, more expensive and invariably bitter. It's usually because one of them wants a commitment the other can't give. Or it does work out. They decide on a recognized partnership or a marriage, usually because the woman gets broody. Mother starts planning the wedding, father calculates the cost, auntie buys a new hat. General relief all round. One more successful skirmish against moral and social chaos.”

Clara laughed. “Well, it's better than the mating ritual of our grandmothers' generation. My grandmother kept a diary and it's all there. She was the daughter of a highly successful solicitor living in Leamington Spa. There wasn't any question of a job for her, of course. After school she lived at home doing the kind of things daughters did while their brothers were at university: arranging the flowers, handing round the cups at tea-parties, a little respectable charity work but not the kind that brought her into touch with the more sordid reality of poverty, answering the boring family letters her mother couldn't be bothered with, helping with the garden fête. Meanwhile, all the mothers organized a social life to ensure their daughters met the right men. Tennis parties, small private dances, garden parties. At twenty-eight a girl started getting anxious; at thirty she was on the shelf. God help the ones who were plain or awkward or shy.”

Emma said, “God help them today for that matter. The system's as brutal in its own way, isn't it? It's just that at least we can organize it ourselves, and there is an alternative.”

Clara laughed. “I don't see what you've got to complain of. You'll hardly be hopping on and off the carousel. You'll be sitting up there on your gleaming steed repelling all boarders. And why make it sound as if the merry-go-round is always heterosexual? We're all looking. Some of us get lucky, and those who don't generally settle for second best. And sometimes second best turns out to be the best after all.”

“I don't want to settle for second best. I know who I want and what I want, and it isn't a temporary affair. I know that if I go to bed with him it will cost me too much if he breaks it off. Bed can't make me more committed than I am now.”

The London train rumbled into platform one. Clara put down her duffle-bag and they hugged briefly.

Emma said, “Until Friday, then.”

Impulsively Clara clasped her arms round her friend again. She said, “If he chucks you on Friday, I think you should consider whether there's any future for the two of you.”

“If he chucks me on Friday, perhaps I shall.”

She stood, watching but not waving, until the train was out of sight.

6

From childhood the word London had conjured up for Tallulah Clutton a vision of a fabled city, a world of mystery and excitement. She told herself that the almost physical yearning of her childhood and youth was neither irrational nor obsessive; it had its roots in reality. She was, after all, a Londoner by birth, born in a two-storey terraced house in a narrow street in Stepney; her parents, grandparents and the maternal grandmother after whom she had been named had been born in the East End. The city was her birthright. Her very survival had been fortuitous and in her more imaginative moods she saw it as magical. When the street was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942 only she, four years old, had been lifted from the rubble alive. It seemed to her that she had a memory of that moment, rooted perhaps in her aunt's account of the rescue. As the years passed she was uncertain whether she remembered her aunt's words or the event itself; how she was lifted into the light, grey with dust but laughing and spreading out both arms as if to embrace the whole street.

Exiled in childhood to a corner shop in a suburb of Leeds to be brought up by her mother's sister and her husband, a part of her spirit had been left in that ruined street. She had been conscientiously and dutifully brought up, and perhaps loved, but as neither her aunt nor uncle was demonstrative or articulate, love was something she neither expected nor understood. She had left school at fifteen, her intelligence recognized by some of the teachers, but there was nothing they could do about it. They knew that the shop awaited her.

When the young gentle-faced accountant who came regularly to audit the books with her uncle began to appear more often than was necessary and to show his interest in her, it seemed natural to accept his eventual and somewhat tentative offer of marriage. There was, after all, enough room in the flat above the shop and room enough in her bed. She was nineteen. Her aunt and uncle made plain their relief. Terence no longer charged for his services. He helped part-time in the shop and life became easier. Tally enjoyed his regular if unimaginative lovemaking and supposed that she was happy. But he had died of a heart attack nine months after the birth of their daughter and the old life was resumed: the long hours, the constant financial anxiety, the welcome yet tyrannical jangle of the bell on the shop door, the ineffectual struggle to compete with the new supermarkets. Her heart would be torn with a desperate pity as she saw her aunt's futile efforts to entice back the old customers; the outer leaves shredded from cabbages and lettuces to make them look less wilted, the advertised bargains which could deceive no one, the willingness to give credit in the hope that the bill would eventually be paid. It seemed to her that her youth had been dominated by the smell of rotting fruit and the jangle of the bell.

Her aunt and uncle had willed her the shop and when they died, within a month of each other, she put it on the market. It sold badly; only masochists or unworldly idealists were interested in saving a failing corner shop. But it did sell. She kept £10,000 of the proceeds, handed over the remainder to her daughter who had long since left home, and set out for London and a job. She had found it at the Dupayne Museum within a week and had known, when first being shown round the cottage by Caroline Dupayne and seeing the Heath from her bedroom window, that she had come home.

Through the overburdened and stringent years of childhood, her brief marriage, her failure as a mother, the dream of London had remained. In adolescence and later, it had strengthened and had taken on the solidity of brick and stone, the sheen of sunlight on the river, the wide ceremonial avenues and narrow byways leading to half-hidden courtyards. History and myth were given a local habitation and a name and imagined people made flesh. London had received her back as one of its own and she had not been disappointed. She had no naÏve expectations that she walked always in safety. The depiction in the museum of life between the wars told what she already knew, that this London was not the capital her parents had known. Theirs had been a more peaceable city and a gentler England. She thought of London as a mariner might think of the sea; it was her natural element but its power was awesome and she encountered it with wariness and respect. On her weekday and Sunday excursions she had devised her protective strategies. Her money, just sufficient for the day, was carried in a money-bag worn under her winter coat or lighter summer jacket. The food she needed, her bus map and a bottle of water were carried in a small rucksack on her back. She wore comfortable stout walking shoes and, if her plans included a long visit to a gallery or museum, carried a light folding canvas stool. With these she moved from picture to picture, one of a small group which followed the lectures at the National Gallery or the Tate, taking in information like gulps of wine, intoxicated with the richness of the bounty on offer.

On most Sundays she would attend a church, quietly enjoying the music, the architecture and the liturgy, taking from each an aesthetic rather than a religious experience, but finding in the order and ritual the fulfilment of some unidentified need. She had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, sent to the local parish church every Sunday morning and evening. She went alone. Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence. Now Tally entered London's churches with the same curiosity and expectation of new experience as she entered the museums. She had always believed—somewhat to her surprise—that God existed but was unconvinced that He was moved by the worship of man or by the tribulations and extraordinary vagaries and antics of the creation He had set in being.

Each evening she would return to the cottage on the edge of the Heath. It was her sanctuary, the place from which she ventured out and to which she returned, tired but satisfied. She could never close the door without an uplifting of her spirits. Such religion as she practised, the nightly prayers she still said, were rooted in gratitude. Until now she had been lonely but not solitary; now she was solitary but never lonely.

Even if the worst happened and she was homeless, she was determined not to seek a home with her daughter. Roger and Jennifer Crawford lived just outside Basingstoke in a modern four-bedroomed house which was part of what the developers had described as “two crescents of executive houses.” The crescents were cut off from the contamination of non-executive housing by steel gates. Their installation, fiercely fought for by householders, was regarded by her daughter and son-in-law as a victory for law and order, the protection and enhancement of property values and a validation of social distinction. There was a council estate hardly half a mile down the road, the inhabitants of which were considered to be inadequately controlled barbarians.

Sometimes Tally thought that the success of her daughter's marriage rested not only on shared ambition, but on their common willingness to tolerate, even to sympathize, with the other's grievances. Behind these reiterated complaints lay, she realized, mutual self-satisfaction. They thought that they had done very well for themselves and would have been deeply chagrined had any of their friends thought otherwise. If they had a genuine worry it was, she knew, the uncertainty of her future, the fact that they might one day be required to give her a home. It was a worry she understood and shared.

She hadn't visited her family for five years except for three days at Christmas, that annual ritual of consanguinity which she had always dreaded. She was received with a scrupulous politeness and a strict adherence to accepted social norms which didn't hide the absence of real warmth or genuine affection. She didn't resent this—whatever she herself was bringing to the family, it wasn't love—but she wished there was some acceptable way of excusing herself from the visit. She suspected that the others felt the same but were inhibited by the need to observe social conventions. To have one's widowed and solitary mother for Christmas was accepted as a duty and, once established, couldn't be avoided without the risk of sly gossip or mild scandal. So punctiliously on Christmas Eve, by a train they had suggested as convenient, she would arrive at Basingstoke station to be met by Roger or Jennifer, her over-heavy case taken from her like the burden it was, and the annual ordeal would get under way.

Christmas at Basingstoke was not peaceful. Friends arrived, smart, vivacious, effusive. Visits were returned. She had an impression of a succession of overheated rooms, flushed faces, yelling voices and raucous conviviality underlined with sexuality. People greeted her, some she felt with genuine kindness, and she would smile and respond before Jennifer tactfully moved her away. She didn't wish her guests to be bored. Tally was relieved rather than mortified. She had nothing to contribute to the conversations about cars, holidays abroad, the difficulty of finding a suitable au pair, the ineffectiveness of the local council, the machinations of the golf club committee, their neighbours' carelessness over locking the gates. She hardly saw her grandchildren except at Christmas dinner. Clive spent most of the day in his room, which held the necessities of his seventeen-year-old life: the television, video and DVD player, computer and printer, stereo equipment and speakers. Samantha, two years younger and apparently in a permanent state of disgruntlement, was rarely at home and, when she was, spent hours secreted with her mobile phone.