The Murder Room (8 page)

But now all this was finished. Ten days ago, after careful thought and three or four rough drafts, Tally had composed the letter. Would they mind very much if she didn't come this year? Miss Caroline wouldn't be in her flat over the holiday and if she, too, went away there would be no one to keep an eye on things generally. She wouldn't be spending the day alone. There were a number of friends who had issued invitations. Of course it wouldn't be the same as coming to the family, but she was sure they would understand. She would post her presents in early December.

She had felt some guilt at the dishonesty of the letter, but it had produced a reply within days. There was a touch of grievance, a suggestion that Tally was allowing herself to be exploited, but she sensed their relief. Her excuse had been valid enough; her absence could safely be explained to their friends. This Christmas she would spend alone in the cottage and already she had been planning how she would pass the day. The morning walk to a local church and the satisfaction of being one of a crowd and yet apart, which she enjoyed, a poussin for lunch with, perhaps, one of those miniature Christmas puddings to follow and a half-bottle of wine, hired videos, library books and, whatever the weather, a walk on the Heath.

But these plans were now less certain. The day after her daughter's letter arrived, Ryan Archer, coming in after his stint in the garden, had hinted that he might be alone for Christmas. The Major was thinking of going abroad. Tally had said impulsively, “You can't spend Christmas in the squat, Ryan. You can come here for dinner if you like. But give me a few days' notice because of getting in the food.”

He had accepted, but tentatively, and she doubted whether he would choose to exchange the camaraderie of the squat for the placid tedium of the cottage. But the invitation had been given. If he came she would at least ensure that he was properly fed. For the first time in years she was looking forward to Christmas.

But now all her plans were overlaid with a fresh and more acute anxiety. Would this coming Christmas be the last she would spend in the cottage?

7

The cancer had returned and this time it was a death sentence. That was James Calder-Hale's personal prognosis and he accepted it without fear and with only one regret: he needed time to finish his book on the inter-war years. He didn't need long; it would be finished in four to six months even if his pace slowed. Time might still be granted, but even as the word came into his mind he rejected it. “Granted” implied the conferment of a benefit. Conferred by whom? Whether he died sooner or later was a matter of pathology. The tumour would take its own time. Or, if you wanted to describe it even more simply, he would be lucky or unlucky. But in the end the cancer would win.

He found himself unable to believe that anything he did, anything done to him, his mental attitude, his courage or his faith in his doctors, could alter that inevitable victory. Others might prepare to live in hope, to earn that posthumous tribute, “after a gallant fight.” He hadn't the stomach for a fight, not with an enemy already so entrenched.

An hour earlier his oncologist had broken the news that he was no longer in remission with professional tact; after all, he had had plenty of experience. He had set out the options for further treatments, and the results which might reasonably be hoped for, with admirable lucidity. Calder-Hale agreed to the recommended course after spending a little time pretending to consider the options, but not too much time. The consultation was taking place at the consultant's Harley Street rooms, not at the hospital, and, despite the fact that his was the first appointment, the waiting-room was already beginning to fill up by the time he was called. To speak his own prognosis, his complete conviction of failure, would be an ingratitude amounting to bad manners when the consultant had taken so much trouble. He felt that it was he who was bestowing the illusion of hope.

Coming out into Harley Street, he decided to take a taxi to Hampstead Heath station and walk across the Heath past Hampstead Ponds and the viaduct to Spaniards Road and the museum. He found himself mentally summing up his life with a detached wonder that fifty-five years which had seemed so momentous could have left him with so meagre a legacy. The facts came into his mind in short staccato statements. Only son of a prosperous Cheltenham solicitor. Father unfrightening, if remote. Mother extravagant, fussily conventional, but no trouble to anyone except her husband. Education at his father's old school, and then Oxford. The Foreign Office and a career, chiefly in the Middle East, which had never progressed beyond the unexceptional. He could have climbed higher but he had demonstrated those two fatal defects: lack of ambition and the impression of taking the Service with insufficient seriousness. A good Arabic speaker with the ability to attract friendship but not love. A brief marriage to the daughter of an Egyptian diplomat who had thought she would like an English husband but had quickly decided that he was not the one. No children. Early retirement following the diagnosis of a malignancy which had unexpectedly and disconcertingly gone into remission.

Gradually, since the diagnosis of his illness, he had dissociated himself from the expectations of life. But hadn't this happened years before? When he had wanted the relief of sex he had paid for it, discreetly, expensively and with the minimum expenditure of time and emotion. He couldn't now remember when he had finally decided that the trouble and expense were no longer worthwhile, not so much an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, as a waste of money in an expanse of boredom. The emotions, excitements, triumphs, failures, pleasures and pains which had filled the interstices of this outline of a life had no power to disturb him. It was difficult to believe that they ever had.

Wasn't accidie, that lethargy of the spirit, one of the deadly sins? To the religious there must seem a wilful blasphemy in the rejection of all joy. His ennui was less dramatic. It was more a placid non-caring in which his only emotions, even the occasional outbursts of irritation, were mere play-acting. And the real play-acting, that boys' game which he had got drawn into more from a good-natured compliance than from commitment, was as uninvolving as the rest of his non-writing existence. He recognized its importance but felt himself less a participant than the detached observer of other men's endeavours, other men's follies.

And now he was left with the one unfinished business, the one task capable of enthusing his life. He wanted to complete his history of the inter-war years. He had been working on it for eight years now, since old Max Dupayne, a friend of his father's, had introduced him to the museum. He had been enthralled by it and an idea which had lain dormant at the back of his mind had sprung into life. When Dupayne had offered him the job of curator, unpaid but with the use of an office, it had been a propitious encouragement to begin writing. He had given a dedication and enthusiasm to the work which no other job had evoked. The prospect of dying with it unfinished was intolerable. No one would care to publish an incomplete history. He would die with the one task to which he had given heart and mind reduced to files of half-legible notes and reams of unedited typescript which would be bundled into plastic bags and collected for salvage. Sometimes the strength of his need to complete the book perturbed him. He wasn't a professional historian; those who were, were unlikely to be merciful in judgement. But the book would not go unnoticed. He had interviewed an interesting variety of the over-eighties; personal testimonies had been skilfully interspersed with historical events. He was putting forward original, sometimes maverick views which would command respect. But he was ministering to his own need, not that of others. For reasons which he couldn't satisfactorily explain he saw the history as a justification for his life.

If the museum closed before the book was finished, it would be the end. He thought he knew the minds of the three trustees, and the knowledge was bitter. Marcus Dupayne was looking for employment that would confer prestige and relieve the boredom of retirement. If the man had been more successful, had achieved his K, the City directorships, the official commissions and committees, would be waiting. Calder-Hale wondered what had gone wrong. Probably nothing which Dupayne could have prevented; a change of government, a new Secretary of State's preferences, a change in the pecking order. Who in the end got the top job was often a matter of luck.

He was less certain why Caroline Dupayne wanted the museum to continue. Preserving the family name probably had something to do with it. Then there was her use of the flat which got her away from the school. And she would always oppose Neville. As long as he could remember the siblings had been antagonistic. Knowing nothing of their childhood, he could only guess at the roots of this mutual irritation. It was exacerbated by their attitudes to each other's job. Neville made no secret of his contempt for everything Swathling's stood for; his sister openly voiced her disparagement of psychiatry. “It isn't even a scientific discipline, just the last resort of the desperate or the indulgence of fashionable neuroses. You can't even describe the difference between mind and brain in any way which makes sense. You've probably done more harm in the last fifty years than any other branch of medicine and you can only help patients today because the neuroscientists and the drug companies have given you the tools. Without their little tablets you would be back where you were twenty years ago.”

There would be no consensus between Neville and Caroline Dupayne about the future of the museum and he thought he knew whose will would be the stronger. Not that they would do much of the work of closing down the place. If the new tenant wanted quick possession, it would be a formidable task undertaken against time, fraught with arguments and financial complications. He was the curator; he would be expected to bear most of the brunt. It would be the end of any hope of finishing the history.

England had rejoiced in a beautiful October more typical of spring's tender vicissitudes than of the year's slow decline into this multicoloured decrepitude. Now suddenly the sky, which had been an expanse of clear azure blue, was darkened by a rolling cloud as grimy as factory smoke. The first drops of rain fell and he had hardly time to push open his umbrella before he was deluged by a squall. It felt as if the accumulated weight of the cloud's precarious burden had emptied itself over his head. There was a clump of trees within yards and he took refuge under a horse chestnut, prepared to wait patiently for the sky to clear. Above him the dark sinews of the tree were becoming visible among the yellowing leaves and, looking up, he felt the slow drops falling on his face. He wondered why it was pleasurable to feel these small erratic splashes on skin already drying from the rain's first assault. Perhaps it was no more than the comfort of knowing that he could still take pleasure in the unsolicited benisons of existence. The more intense, the grosser, the urgent physicalities had long lost their edge. Now that appetite had become fastidious and sex rarely urgent, a relief he could provide for himself, at least he could still relish the fall of a raindrop on his cheek.

And now Tally Clutton's cottage came into view. He had paced up this narrow path from the Heath innumerable times during the last four years but always he came upon the cottage with a shock of surprise. It looked comfortably at home among the fringe of trees, and yet it was an anachronism. Perhaps the architect of the museum, forced by his employer's whim to produce exactly an eighteenth-century replica for the main house, had indulged his preference when designing the cottage. Situated as it was, at the back of the museum and out of sight, his client may not have been greatly troubled that it was discordant. It looked like a picture from a child's storybook with its two ground-floor bay windows on each side of a jutting porch, the two plain windows under a pantile roof, its neat front garden with the paved stone path leading to the front door and a lawn each side bound by a low privet hedge. There was an oblong, slightly raised bed in the middle of each lawn and here Tally Clutton had planted her usual white cyclamen and purple and white winter pansies.

As he approached the gate of the garden, Tally appeared from among the trees. She was wearing the old mackintosh that she usually donned for gardening and carrying a wooden basket and holding a trowel. She had told him, although he couldn't remember when, that she was sixty-four, but she looked younger. Her face, the skin a little roughened, was beginning to show the clefts and lines of age, but it was a good face, keen-eyed behind the spectacles, a calm face. She was a contented woman, but not, thank God, given to that resolute and desperate cheerfulness with which some of the ageing attempted to defy the attrition of the years.

Whenever he re-entered the museum grounds after walking on the Heath he would call at the cottage to see if Tally was at home. If it were the morning there would be coffee and in the afternoon there was tea and fruit cake. This routine had begun some three years earlier when he had been caught in a heavy storm without an umbrella and had arrived with soaking jacket and sodden trousers clinging to his legs. She had seen him from the window and had come out, offering him a chance to dry his clothes and have a warm drink. Her anxiety at his appearance had overcome any shyness she must have felt and he remembered gratefully the warmth of the imitation coal fire and the hot coffee laced with a little whisky which she had provided. But she hadn't repeated the invitation to come in, and he sensed that she was anxious that he should not think she was lonely for company or somehow imposing on him an obligation. It was always he who knocked or called out, but he had no doubt that she welcomed his visits.

Now, waiting for her, he said, “Am I too late for coffee?”

“Of course not, Mr. Calder-Hale. I've just been planting daffodil bulbs between the showers. I think they look better under the trees. I've tried them in the middle beds but they look so depressing after the flowers have died. Mrs. Faraday says that we must leave the leaves until they're absolutely yellow and can be pulled out or we won't get flowers next year. But that takes so long.”