The Twilight Hour (7 page)

‘And if it doesn't?'

‘I'll see you in the office.'

I reminded him it would be Saturday. He said to come round anyway, and then we'd decide what to do.

I couldn't help feeling it would be even more difficult to go to the police tomorrow, but Stanley was persuasive, and anyway I wanted to go home. Sitting in the milk bar with its few stale sandwiches and buns had reminded me I was tired and hungry.

He walked me to the underground and patted my arm as we parted in the station ticket office. ‘It'll be okay,' he said. ‘Don't worry. It'll all be hunky-dory.'

Maybe optimism was what you needed more than anything else if you were to become a successful property developer. That and making other people believe you. And the thing about Stanley was you
did
believe him. For the time being, anyway.

six

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE EVENING
and only a few tired passengers were scattered along the underground carriage. No one even glanced at me. I must look quite normal, when in fact I was radioactive with the shock of finding Titus Mavor's dead body in Mecklenburgh Square. I could hardly sit still, but my agitation was all in my body; I fidgeted and wriggled as if my clothes were filled with itching powder, while my mind was blank. There was no emotion, simply this epileptic feeling of having been wired up to the mains. Of course my weary fellow travellers sagging dejectedly along the seats were probably used to dead bodies. Perhaps everyone was still in shock after the war. There'd been so many dead bodies then. And this grey time was less Peacetime than the Aftermath of War. We were living in an Aftermath of dulled and deadened feelings.

My promise to Stanley: keep quiet until tomorrow – how could I? My loyalty to Alan, to my husband, clashed with this new loyalty. Stanley
must
be wrong; it must be one's duty to report the discovery of a body.

At Notting Hill Gate I made for one of the row of call boxes in the station. Again the metallic smell of the kiosk as I waited for 999 to answer.

‘Ambulance!' I shouted, when I finally got through, and then, ‘There's someone very ill in Mecklenburgh Square.' The man at the other end was asking questions. ‘Where are you? Is he breathing?'

My heart thumped. What on earth could I say?

‘Is the person breathing? Are you there?'

I panicked, hung up, and bolted from the phone booth, pulling my scarf round my face for fear someone would notice me, and remember me later.

I tried to hurry, but the ice and snow slowed me down as I stumbled along. My boots squeaked along the dark street towards the flat. The body of another tart had been discovered the previous week, but I was too worried about Mavor to be scared. Could they trace my call? I'd left fingerprints at the kiosk too – I'd taken off my gloves to put my pennies in the slot. I hadn't even disguised my voice. The police were sure to discover I lived in Notting Hill, because they would, in the end, in fact probably quite soon, discover the body, identify Mavor and find out all about his friends and acquaintances. They'd find out I'd failed to report his death. They'd arrest me. They might even suspect I'd murdered him.

Murder? He'd died from drink, from artistic excess.

I dreaded facing Alan. What was I going to tell him? Stanley had sworn me to secrecy, but I had to tell my husband. According to the Christian marriage ceremony we were one flesh anyway: one flesh, one person, so telling Alan wasn't like telling another person at all, not really – only would Stanley understand that? I didn't think so. To him it would be mere quibbling, which it was.

I wasn't sure, actually, that we were one flesh, since we'd only been married in a register office (my mother mortified, cheated of even an austerity white wedding, my father secretly relieved to avoid the fuss and expense).

I reached the house and looked upwards. The flat was in darkness: a surge of relief; Alan was out. I ran up the stairs to get out of the cold, lit the gas oven and left the door open to warm up the kitchen while I made hot Bovril and toast. I turned on the radio, hoping for a news bulletin, but there wasn't one due.

Time ticked idly by. Now I was agitated because I had no one to talk to. I wondered where Alan was and what he was doing. I wandered into the sitting room, to see if he'd left a note. There wasn't one, and anyway, he'd have left it on the kitchen table. We lived in the kitchen, to save electricity. Since we'd burnt the wood we'd collected we hardly used the chilly sitting room and it smelled musty and stale.

It was ten o'clock before I heard voices on the stairs – huge relief. Alan wasn't alone; Hugh and Colin must be with him. My confession could be postponed – though at the same time I was bursting with the need to tell all.

Alan surged into the kitchen followed by Hugh. Colin wasn't with them after all, but the cramped room felt overcrowded even with just two great big men. They were triumphant and euphoric, like commandos after a successful mission.

‘Darling! Hugh thinks he's winning Radu round.' Alan, usually undemonstrative in public, hugged me. He was rosy from the cold and he smelled of the frost and smoke of the streets.

He produced a half bottle of gin from his capacious coat pocket and set it on the table. They'd obviously already had a few. And was there something odd about their mood? A tinge of schoolboy guilt as if they'd pulled off some prank? Alan searched around and found some Rose's lime juice to have with the gin and we gathered at the table to celebrate. He sat leaning back majestically, the monarch of all he surveyed. Hugh was sparkling with glee.

‘Where's Colin?' I asked.

They exchanged looks. Hugh went a bit pink.

‘Had something better to do,' mumbled Alan.

I listened to them for a while as they mapped out the plot. With each shot of gin their script grew more elaborate. They were totally absorbed. I sat there with a lump of concrete in my stomach. Mavor. I hadn't forgotten. Of course I hadn't. Why couldn't I tell them? I simply couldn't, not with Hugh there. I needed to get Alan alone.

‘Alan …?'

‘Yes, darling?' He looked up distractedly.

‘I'm a bit sleepy. Would you mind if I …'

He completely misunderstood. Sweet – he thought I was trying to entice him to bed. But how would he have guessed what I had to tell him? He wouldn't have in a hundred years. He grinned. ‘Okay, I'll be along in a tick.'

.........

As I groped my way forward the shadows pressed round me. The house was icy cold. Moonlight gleamed on his glistening face; the body lay on the sagging sofa. Terror rose from the pit of my stomach and became a scream as I surged up towards consciousness and surfaced in darkness.

Alan's arms were round me. ‘Darling – darling. You had a nightmare. You must have been cold – the eiderdown's slid off.'

The feeling of horror, so overwhelming in the dream, faded, but of course I told him everything.

We were still talking three hours later as it got light. What Alan called my pluck astonished him. To take it so calmly, to report back to Stanley – actually he was annoyed I hadn't gone straight to him (only I couldn't have, because he was out). I could see that the more he discussed it, the more sceptical he became. ‘Are you
sure
he was dead?' he kept saying. ‘You couldn't have imagined it?'

‘Imagined it? Don't be such a clot!'

‘Stanley should never have sent you round like that.' He was outraged that
his wife
had been used as messenger on some shady errand. It must have been some crooked deal, he said. But if Stanley was crooked, didn't that mean that Titus was too? I asked, but Alan endearingly resisted the idea that Titus – an old Etonian, after all, like him – could have been implicated in anything underhand. Yes, he was a cad, but vulgar criminal activity, never.

‘Then what was the cheque for, darling?
A hundred and fifty pounds
!'

‘Are you sure you read it properly? It wasn't fifty? Fifteen?'

‘It wasn't fifty, or fifteen, Alan.' I paused. ‘You don't think it could have been blackmail, do you?'

Blackmailers hounded their victims, hounded them even to death. Blackmail was a private crime, to do with secrets and sins, with adultery, poisoning, incest. It was a spiteful, twisted thing, a form of persecution – and the painter had certainly struck me as spiteful. At the very least, he liked needling people, although that wasn't quite the same thing. Anyway, what could he have blackmailed Stanley
about
? If my boss dabbled in the black market it was on a very small scale; and even with his property deals he was only doing what everyone was doing all over the country: getting around rationing, restrictions and red tape. Even my father, who deplored the mounting crime wave in the strongest possible terms, even he had accepted a goose from a client – a farmer – he'd successfully defended. That wasn't under the counter or black market; that was gratitude.

It was true, too, that Stanley was trying to get divorced, but no women ever called the office, he didn't seem to have a girlfriend: unless – and the thought struck me forcibly – he was actually having an affair with Gwendolen. But I didn't believe that either.

Alan scoffed at the idea of blackmail. ‘Titus! Don't be ridiculous. Even if he wanted to he's simply not organised enough; chaotic, his life's in a state of advanced decomposition.' (He spoke as though Titus were still alive.) ‘It might have been Colman's idea to pay him to keep quiet about something, I suppose …'

I was afraid Alan would want me to stop being Stanley's secretary now. To avoid, or at least postpone that argument I set him off on what was after all the greater puzzle: why was Titus dead? Drink – yes – yet many forty-year-olds drank as much as he, with no apparent ill effects. Everyone we knew drank – everyone except Stanley, anyway, and that didn't count, because he wasn't one of the Wheatsheaf crowd.

It was getting light now. Alan sprang out of bed: ‘We're going round there.'

‘What on earth for?'

He pulled on his trousers: ‘We were going to Charing Cross Road anyway, remember? It's more or less on our way – well, sort of.'

‘The bookshops won't be open yet!'

‘By the time we've had breakfast – and I'm having a bath. If there's any hot water.'

An hour or so later as we walked to the bus stop he said: ‘You are sure it wasn't
all
in the dream? Only in the dream. You don't think–'

That
was
it! He thought I'd imagined the whole thing, the pig. That's why he wanted to go round to Mecklenburgh Square. He was expecting to find Titus Mavor alive and well – alive at least.

The square was deserted. The door of 119 was still not quite shut. We stepped inside. ‘Wait here,' said Alan in a low voice. ‘I'll go on up.'

When he came down again he looked very pale. ‘We'll have to report it,' he said. He walked a few steps away from the house, stopped and, for once, seemed at a loss. ‘We
have
to report it, can't just let it go … Oh God, I wish I hadn't dragged you round here now … Let's just say we called round to see him – no need to mention last night. Yes, that's it. We'll just say we called round this morning and found him like that.'

We walked across to the police station in Tottenham Court Road in almost total silence. The officer on duty was deferential, and promised to send someone round right away. ‘Must have been a bit of a shock for you, sir. A friend, you said he was?'

‘Yes – well, not a close friend, but … known him a long time, you see.'

The policeman took down our names and address. ‘I daresay this statement will be sufficient, but we may need to see you again.'

We came out into the grey street. Some shop windows were still boarded up, but articles for sale were beginning to reappear in the others. We walked towards the Charing Cross Road, passing Heal's, where a beautiful blue sofa in the window caught my attention. Export only, of course, and anyway we had no money to buy a sofa, nor anywhere to put it either, for that matter; but it took my mind off Mavor – briefly.

We wandered down to the Charing Cross Road and browsed round the bookshops, but our hearts weren't in it. ‘D'you think the police will get in touch with us again?'

Alan shrugged. ‘Don't expect so. We gave a statement, after all.'

‘You did.'

‘It's not as if there was anything suspicious.'

Alan had taken charge in the police station, but I could see that underneath the air of authority he was shaken. Titus Mavor sprawled on the sofa in broad daylight must have been an unpleasant sight. The house was arctic but he'd been dead for nearly twenty-four hours now: at least. And it was odd, but Alan had come through the war without seeing any dead bodies. With death all around he'd floated through, only to come up against a corpse, now, in peacetime. It was ironic, but I was almost – not glad, but … relieved to see him vulnerable. Somehow it vindicated me.

On a normal Saturday we queued for food in the Portobello Road market, and got our meat ration from the butcher we were registered with over there. This was not a normal Saturday, but food had to be obtained, so we abandoned the bookshops for Soho, where we scraped together some vegetables. They were terribly expensive – carrots at a shilling and sixpence, when normally they'd be about twopence, but we bought them anyway, and they all went into my string bag, which I took, rolled up in my pocket, wherever I went, because you never knew when you might chance upon something worth getting, a jar of Bovril, for example, or something off points like Ovaltine (which I didn't like, but Alan ate it neat, the granules straight out of the tin).