19
Thursday was his day off. Not that he would take a day off as he meant to run Lovat to earth—a fine metaphor, he thought, to use in connection with a protector of wildlife—but there was no reason for early rising. He had gone to sleep thinking what an old fool he was to suppose Nancy Lake fancied him when she was going to marry Somerset, and when morning came he was deep in a Hathall dream. This time it was totally nonsensical with Hathall and his woman embarking on to a flying 28 bus, and the phone ringing by his bed jerked him out of it at eight o’clock.
‘I thought I’d get you before I left for work,’ said Howard’s voice. ‘I’ve found the bus stop, Reg.’
That was more alerting than the alarm bell of the phone. ‘Tell,’ he said.
‘I saw him leave Marcus Flower at five-thirty, and when he went up to Bond Street station I knew he’d be going to her. I had to go back to my own manor for a couple of hours, but I got down to the New King’s Road by half past ten. God, it was easy. The whole exercise worked out better than I dared hope.
‘I was sitting on one of the front seats downstairs, the nearside by the window. He wasn’t at the stop at the top of Church Street or the next one just after Notting Hill Gate station. I knew if he was going to get on it would have to be soon and then, lo and behold, there he was all on his own at a request stop half-way up Pembridge Road. He went upstairs. I stayed on the bus and saw him get off at West End Green, and then,’ Howard ended triumphantly, ‘I went on to Golders Green and came home in a cab.’
‘Howard, you are my only ally.’
‘Well, you know what Chesterton said about that. I’ll be at that bus stop from five-thirty onwards tonight and then we’ll see.’
Wexford put on his dressing gown and went downstairs to find what Chesterton had said. There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one …’ He felt considerably cheered. Maybe he had no force of men at his disposal but he had Howard, the resolute, the infinitely reliable, the invincible, and together they were two thousand. Two thousand and one with Lovat. He must bathe and dress and get over to Myringham right away.
The head of Myringham CID was in, and with him Sergeant Hutton.
‘Not a bad day,’ said Lovat, peering through his funny little spectacles at the uniformly white, dull, sun-free sky.
Wexford thought it best to say nothing about Richard Grey. ‘Did you get to work on that pay-roll thing?’
Lovat nodded very slowly and profoundly, but it was the sergeant who was appointed spokesman. ‘We found one or two accounts which looked suspicious, sir. Three, to be precise. One was in the Trustee Savings Bank at Toxborough, one at Passingham St John and one here. All had had regular payments made into them by Kidd and Co., and in all cases the payments and withdrawals ceased in March or April of last year. The one in Myringham was in the name of a woman whose address turned out to be a sort of boarding house-cum-hotel. The people there don’t remember her and we haven’t been able to trace her. The one at Passingham turned out to be valid, all above board. The woman there worked at Kidd’s, left in the March and just didn’t bother to take the last thirty pee out of her account.’
‘And the Toxborough account?’
‘That’s the difficulty, sir. It’s in the name of a Mrs Mary Lewis and the address is a Toxborough address, but the house is shut up and the people evidently away. The neighbours say they’re called Kingsbury not Lewis, but they’ve taken in lodgers over the years and one of them could have been a Lewis. We just have to wait till the Kingsburys come back.’
‘Do these neighbours know when they’re coming back?’
‘No,’ said Lovat.
Does anyone ever go away the week before Christmas and not stay away till after Christmas? Wexford thought it unlikely. His day off stretched before him emptily. A year ago he had resolved to be patient, but the time had come when he was counting the hours rather than the days to Hathall’s departure. Four days. Ninety-six hours. And that, he thought, must be the only instance when a large number sounds pitifully smaller than a small number. Ninety-six hours. Five thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes. Nothing. It would be gone in the twinkling of an eye …
And the frustrating thing was that he had to waste those hours, those thousands of minutes, for there was nothing left for him personally to do. He could only go home and help Dora hang up more paper chains, arrange more coy bunches of mistletoe, plant the Christmas tree in its tub, speculate with her as to whether the turkey was small enough to lie on an oven shelf or big enough instead to be suspended by strings from the oven roof. And on Friday when only seventy-two hours remained (four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes) he went with Burden up to the police station canteen for the special Christmas dinner. He even put on a paper hat and pulled a cracker with Policewoman Polly Davis.
Ahead of him was his tea date with Nancy Lake. He nearly phoned her to cancel it, but he didn’t do this, telling himself there were still one or two questions she could answer for him and that this was as good a way as any of using up some of those four thousand-odd minutes. By four o’clock he was in Wool Lane, not thinking about her at all, thinking how, eight months before, he had walked there with Howard, full of hope and energy and determination.
‘We’ve been lovers for nineteen years,’ she said. ‘I’d been married for five and I’d come to live here with my husband, and one day when I was walking in the lane I met Mark. He was in his father’s garden, picking plums. We knew its proper name, but we called it a miracle tree because it was a miracle for us,’
‘The jam,’ said Wexford, ‘is very good.’
‘Have some more.’ She smiled at him across the table. The room where they were sitting was as bare as Eileen Hathall’s and there were no Christmas decorations. But it wasn’t barren or sterile or cold. He could see signs everywhere of the removal of a picture, a mirror, an ornament, and looking at her, listening to her, he could imagine the beauty and the character of those furnishings that were packed now, ready to be taken to her new home. The dark blue velvet curtains still hung at the french window, and she had drawn them to shut out the early midwinter dusk. They made for her a sombre night sky background, and she glowed against them, her face a little flushed, the old diamond on her finger and the new diamond beside it, sparking rainbow fire from the light of the lamp at her side. ‘Do you know,’ she said suddenly, ‘what it’s like to be in love and have nowhere to go to make love?’
‘I know it—vicariously.’
‘We managed as best we could. My husband found out and then Mark couldn’t come to Wool Lane any more. We’d tried not seeing each other and sometimes we kept it up for months, but it never worked.’
‘Why didn’t you marry? Neither of you had children.’
She took his empty cup and re-filled it. As she passed it to him, her fingers just brushed his and he felt himself grow hot with something that was almost anger. As if it wasn’t bad enough, he thought, her being there and looking like that without all this sex talk as well. ‘My husband died,’ she said. ‘We were going to many. Then Mark’s wife got ill and he couldn’t leave her. It was impossible.’
He couldn’t keep the sneering note out of his voice. ‘So you remained faithful to each other and lived in hopes?’
‘No, there were others—for me.’ She looked at him steadily, and he found himself unable to return that look. ‘Mark knew, and if he minded he never blamed me. How could he? I told you once, I felt like a distraction, something to—to divert him when he could be spared from his wife’s bedside.’
‘Was it she you meant when you asked me if it was wrong to wish for someone’s death?’
‘Of course. Who else? Did you think—did you think I was speaking of Angela? Her gravity went and she was smiling again. Oh, my dear …! Shall I tell you something else? Two years ago when I was very bored and very lonely because Gwen Somerset was home from hospital and wouldn’t let Mark out of her sight, I—I made advances to Robert Hathall. There’s confession for you! And he wouldn’t have me. He turned me down. I am not accustomed,’ she said with mock pomposity, ‘to being turned down.’
‘I suppose not. Do you think I’m blind,’ he said rather savagely, ‘or a complete fool?’
‘Just unapproachable. If you’ve finished, shall we go into the other room? It’s more comfortable. I haven’t yet stripped it of every vestige of me.’
His questions were answered, and there was no need now to ask where she had been when Angela died or where Somerset had been, or probe any of those mysteries about her and Somerset, which were mysteries no more. He might as well say goodbye and go, he thought, as he crossed the hall behind her and followed her into a warmer room of soft textures and deep rich colours, and where there seemed no hard surfaces, but only silk melting into velvet and velvet into brocade. Before she could close the door, he held out his hand to her, meaning to begin a little speech of thanks and farewell. But she took his hand in both of hers.
‘I shall be gone on Monday,’ she said, looking up into his face. ‘The new people are moving in. We shan’t meet again. I would promise you that, if you like.’
Up till then he had doubted her intentions towards him. There was no room for doubt now.
‘Why should you think I want to be the last fling for a woman who is going to her first love?’
He said, ‘I’m an old man, and an old man who is taken in by compliments is pathetic.’
She flushed a little. ‘I shall soon be an old woman. We could be pathetic together.’ A rueful laugh shook her voice. ‘Don’t go yet. We can—talk. We’ve never really talked yet.’
‘We have done nothing but talk,’ said Wexford, but he didn’t go. He let her lead him to the sofa and sit beside him and talk to him about Somerset and Somerset’s wife and the nineteen years of secrecy and deception. Her hand rested in his, and as he relaxed and listened to her, he remembered the first time he had held it and what she had said when he had kept hold of it a fraction too long. At last she got up. He also rose and put that hand to his lips. ‘I wish you happy,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re going to be very happy.’
‘I’m a little afraid, you know, of how it will be after so long. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Of course.’ He spoke gently, all savagery gone, and when she asked him to have a drink with her, he said, ‘I’ll drink to you and to your happiness.’
She put her arms round his neck and kissed him. The kiss was impulsive, light, over before he could respond to her or resist her. She was gone from the room for some minutes, more minutes than were needful to fetch drinks and glasses. He heard the sound of her footsteps overhead, and he guessed how she would be when she came back. So he had to decide what he should do, whether to go or stay. Gather ye rosebuds, roses, other men’s flowers, while ye may? Or be an old man, dreaming dreams and being mindful of one’s marriage vows?
The whole of his recent life seemed to him a long series of failures, of cowardice and caution. And yet the whole of his recent life had also been bent towards doing what he believed to be right and just. Perhaps, in the end, it came to the same thing.
At last he went out into the hall. He called her name, ‘Nancy!’, using that name for the first and only time, and when he moved to the foot of the stairs, he saw her at the head of them. The light there was soft and kind, unnecessarily kind, and she was as he had known she would be, as he had seen her in his fantasies—only better than that, better than his expectations.
He looked up at her in wondering appreciation, looked for long silent minutes. But by then he had made up his mind.
Only the unwise dwell on what is past with regret for rejected opportunity or nostalgia for chosen delight. He regretted nothing, for he had only done what any man of sense would have done in his position. His decision had been reached during those moments while she had been away from the room and he had stuck to that decision, confident he was acting according to his own standards and what was right for him. But he was astonished to find it was so late when he let himself into his own house, nearly eight o’clock. And at the recalling of his mind to time’s passing, he was back to counting the minutes, back to calculating that only about three and a half thousand of them remained. Nancy’s face faded, the warmth of her vanished. He marched into the kitchen where Dora was making yet another batch of mince pies and said rather brusquely, ‘Has Howard phoned?’
She looked up. He had forgotten—he was always forgetting—how astute she was. ‘He wouldn’t phone at this time, would he? It’s last thing at night or first thing in the morning with him.’
‘Yes, I know. But I’m strung up about this thing.’
‘Indeed you are. You forgot to kiss me.’
So he kissed her, and the immediate past was switched off. No regrets, he reminded himself, no nostalgia, no introspection. And he took a mince pie and bit into the hot crisp crust.
‘You’ll get fat and gross and revolting.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Wexford thoughtfully, ‘that wouldn’t be such a bad thing—in moderation, of course.’