A Splash of Red (3 page)

The telephone rang persistently. Jemima picked it up. According to Chloe, most of the calls would be wrong numbers. She had not yet sent out her new telephone number to her friends.

At first, therefore, Jemima assumed that she was listening to a misdirected call. She stepped back all the same and handled the instrument gingerly. It was a mean little white object, giving a rather shrill 'pip-pip', as opposed to a full-blooded ring.

Jemima intended to give the correct number in a cold and reproving voice, but did not have time to do so.

'You whore,' said the voice quite distinctly. Jemima, urban born and accustomed if not indifferent to such things, began to put the receiver back hastily, when the voice said, equally distinctly:

'Supposing there was a real splash of red on the carpet. Or would you prefer it on the bed?'

2

Disappearing in London

Automatically, Jemima replaced the telephone receiver. She stood in the white flat, quiet again after the persistent odious ringing, and looked at the miniature instrument. She considered whether to leave the receiver off the hook.

It was now nearly nine o'clock. She had deliberately not left Chloe's number with the American girl to whom she had lent her own flat in a very different area of London. Jemima had told her tenant rather vaguely that she was 'going away' and to get in touch with Megalith Television if there were any crises. She had told Guthrie Carlyle that she was 'going somewhere to have some peace' without mentioning that this peace was to be found in Bloomsbury. Her secretary, the nubile Cherry, the toast of Megalithic House, was herself on holiday in Corfu. There were no family demands likely to be made upon Jemima, no sorrowing widowed mother, no helpless bachelor father, no sister in the process of leaving an intolerable husband who might wish to call her.

Jemima Shore had many close friends, many admirers and numerous acquaintances, quite apart from the vast public who assumed they were her intimates from seeing her image on the television screen. But she was one of those rare people who, as far as she knew, had no living blood relations or, at any rate, no close ones. She was herself an only child. Both her parents had been only children and they had died together in a car crash when she was eighteen. Since then a couple of elderly spinster cousins, living together in the New Forest, who had briefly attempted to supply a family for her - without success, for she had not wanted another family - had also died. Jemima Shore was alone in the world. She preferred it that way. She had the freedom, as she saw it, to choose her own friends.

A London holiday had struck her at the time as a brilliant idea for escaping into peace. There was the Reading Room of the British Library, waiting like the belly of a whale to swallow her up during the day. Then there was none of the commitment and disruption of country life; to say nothing of the problems of reaching the country on a summer's day. Her own holiday journey had taken twenty minutes on the Underground from Holland Park station. She deliberately left her precious new Citroen behind - that too was a kind of freedom - and travelled with one piece of highly expensive, highly efficiently packed Lark luggage, navy blue piped in red, sitting at her feet. Her two other Jean Muir dresses in the thin silk jersey she loved, would emerge from it as immaculately as they had gone in - and would scarcely need the long white bedroom cupboard allotted to them by Chloe.

Jemima loved to travel light. Watching the impassive faces opposite her in the Tube, lit up occasionally by the sort of recognition she had learnt to accept without enjoying, she had thought with delight: 'You're going to work. I'm going on holiday. I'm disappearing in London.'

Jemima Shore, with no ties, thought that yes, she would take the telephone off the hook.

She certainly saw no necessity to receive the threatening calls of Kevin John Athlone. For such, she had realized, the identity of the caller must inevitably be. Who else would have made such unpleasant play with the title of the picture? And there was something quite nastily sexual about the last innuendo - 'Or would you prefer it on the bed' -which put her in mind, uncomfortably, of Chloe's last remarks, her hints of violence, her use of the word 'submissive'. A moment's crossness against the careless Chloe swept through her. To have deliberately stated that he did not have the number - and then to be caught out almost immediately after she had left the flat!

Nevertheless Jemima was surprised. For one thing it was quite unlike Chloe to lie. Eighteen years of friendship - yes, it had to be nearly as long - had included numerous intrigues, mysteries. Jemima had also provided a good many alibis in the course of Chloe's two marriages; one lasting eight years and one a bare twelve months before Chloe had been swept off her feet by Kevin John. Naturally lies had been told in that period. Yet Jemima was convinced that fundamentally Chloe was not a liar. In most ways - except where adultery had been, briefly, concerned - she was abnormally candid and truthful. 'Scheherazade' -Jemima remembered Chloe's words - 'I'll tell you all.' Jemima had had experience of Chloe's frank confessions before; they justified the title.

It was true that Chloe had been holding something back, to be revealed hereafter; but it was hardly somethi
ng as trivial yet irritating as
the fact that Kevin John Athlone had recently discovered her new telephone number. The mystery tantalized Jemima for a moment, and then she dismissed it.

On the glass table in front of the white sofa lay two books. Jemima glanced at the publisher's colophon on the spines. A golden helmet with a B set in it: Brighthelmet Press, Valentine Brighton's publishing house, the name a combination of his own and that of his home in Sussex, Helmet Manor. She looked inside the top book: a quick note was scribbled on the publisher's slip inside, where the golden helmet was repeated. She read: 'Tuesday. To the marriage of true minds. Love V.'

Jemima was surprised for the second time that evening. Valentine Brighton, that famously polite young man, was fond of sending round books to his authors or people he sought to
become
his authors. Whimsical notes beneath the sign of the golden helmet generally accompanied these gifts, which had begun to arrive on Jemima's desk as soon as Valentine Brighton realized that she might possibly be persuaded to write a book for him. The symbol of the golden helmet always reminded Jemima of Valentine Brighton himself with his sleek poll of thick fair hair. It was hair which always looked neat and clean and brushed, even when fashion dictated that it would sweep the shoulders of his polo-necked jersey; and, despite its length, it irresistibly reminded her of the kind of hair possessed by the young officers who went out to die in the trenches in the First World War.

Jemima's book parcels arrived at Megalithic House conveyed by Lord Brighton's chauffeur, driving the Brighton Rolls-Royce. 'Old as the hills,' said its owner airily. But it was not in fact all that old. It was just that, like all Valentine Brighton's possessions, it looked rather old - and rather good. The chauffeur also figured in Valentine Brighton's airy
dicta.

'Used to be a gamekeeper at Helmet. But it turned out that he loathed everything to do with potting birds and loved machines. So, a wave of the Brighton fairy wand - and lo and behold, the best chauffeur in London. What luck it is to be a feudal landlord, particularly in these difficult days of staff problems.'

Jemima was never quite sure how serious that kind of remark was meant to be. It certainly
was
lucky to have inherited as a child an Elizabethan manor house, both famous and inhabitable, in a fold of the Sussex downs near the sea; plus a great deal of rich farming land surrounding it. Yet, given such a 'lucky' deal from life, why had Valentine Brighton elected to work extremely hard in Bloomsbury building up a publishing firm? Presumably, like his chauffeur, he had winced from a life of 'potting birds'. Yet at the same time Lord Brighton showed no desire to throw off his background. Jemima had never detected in him the faintest gleam of fashionable guilt at his -considerable - inherited wealth. On the contrary, the remark concerning the chauffeur was merely typical of a whole host of such allusions.

Jemima wrenched her mind from Valentine to his note. Marriage. Valentine and Chloe. Was it possible? Anything was possible with Chloe, that she had long ago learned. But Valentine? He could hardly be Chloe's new lover - already a married man by her own account. Or was it her former lover who had been married? Her last words had been ambiguous.

'Tuesday' - and today was Friday. The position of the books suggested that they had not been there very long. Was Chloe really contemplating marrying Valentine Brighton? It was odd, if so, that Chloe's remarks about Valentine, her sales, and the likely problem of her new book had had a genuinely cross rather than a romantic tinge. For that matter, the note itself was ambiguous. 'The marriage of true minds' did not necessarily refer to holy matrimony.

Yet there had been something to the relationship. 'Quite riveting', Chloe's words. Scheherazade would inform her on her return. Still, Chloe might perhaps cast some light on the topic which had troubled the gossip-mongers in literary London of the past. Exactly what if any were Valentine's sexual proclivities? On that subject, Valentine himself generally took refuge in a cloud of what Jemima privately termed his 'feudal' references: 'Mummy simply won't
let
me marry the sort of girl who can tell one end of a book from the other.' On another occasion: 'Mummy says the library at Helmet was full up at the end of the eighteenth century and a bookish girl would only ruin it, by rearranging things, or worse still
reading
the books.' It was easy to put all this together, the allegedly dominating figure of 'Mummy', Valentine's bachelor state and the pseudo-comic references, to make of him a homosexual. If so, Valentine was an exceptionally discreet one, surprisingly and surely unnecessarily so for the times in which he lived.

On the other hand there was the question of his health. 'This weak but well-bred heart beats for you' had been his characteristic way of proposing a publisher's contract to Jemima. It was common knowledge that Valentine's father had died young of a heart condition and that his mother dreaded the same fate overtaking her only child. 'Mummy positively panics when I play the third set at tennis.' That at least was a modest smoke-screen, for Valentine Brighton, far from being the effete performer his appearance might promise, was an exceptional athlete, at least by the standards of the set in which he moved.

Perhaps 'waiting for Lady Right' - another of his teasing phrases -was indeed what he had been doing. And Chloe Fontaine, twice married already, had turned out to be the chosen she. The picture of Chloe queening it at Helmet was indeed a seductive one - even if her reign might prove
short-lived
. How long would she stand it? A year? Two years? There was still something odd about the whole business. At this point Jemima decided that she had spent enough time in one evening on Chloe and her amours. Resolutely, she ignored both Brighthelmet Press books. They belonged to an elaborate History of Taste, whose main object was to induce feelings of guilt in the purchaser, pangs to be assuaged by buying (but not necessarily reading) the books.

Jemima picked up her own Nadine Gordimer novel, and went to the wide balcony, hoping that there would be light enough to read in the comparative cool of the summer's evening. However, she found an outside switch and turned it on. Suddenly the balcony was flooded with light: for a moment she had the impression of being on a stage in a darkened theatre when the lights are switched on. The dark balcony to the right and the equally dark scaffolding to the left, gave the irresistible effect of theatrical wings.

Jemima felt totally vulnerable, even at that great height over the square. She was exposed to whatever strange malignant forces were out there in the darkness. Moreover, an extraordinary fear seized her - she, not given to such things - that there was someone waiting in the wings. Someone perhaps in the obscurity of the scaffolding to her left.

As a result, an unexpected soft thump very close to her made her give a light scream until she realized it was Tiger, returning from some nocturnal prowl. The ghost of the dead Colette, who had so often glided into her flat at night through the cat flap, a small unmistakeable sound, called to her. But she had not come here to listen to the mew of Colette's ghost.

Resolutely Jemima gave herself up to concentrate on Nadine Gordimer. She was immediately carried into another far-off and sombre world. When she next squinted at the elegant little gold bracelet watch she always wore, it was
11.30.

Time to sleep and be fresh for the Reading Room of the British Library tomorrow. The intoxication of having disappeared in London overwhelmed Jemima with childish delight. She would read - or perhaps she would not read - in bed. She would read, but she would abandon Nadine Gordimer for the night and read John Le Carre; she had spotted one by Chloe's bed. It was a great help that Jemima had read this Le Carre before, and would thus, in her sleepy state, have a head start with the plot. It was, in its own way, delightful that she was not in her own luxurious but somehow demanding bed at home, with all its little pleasures and appurtenances about it, books, photographs, articles to read, paraphernalia. Last thing, she put the telephone back on the hook in the sitting room.

Afterwards she was not quite sure whether she had actually fallen asleep or not over Le Carre (it was in fact no help to her that she had read it before; the plot remained dazzling but impenetrable) when she was startled by the plaintive peep-peep of the little telephone by the bed.

'Dollie?' It was a woman's voice, anxious and quite elderly. 'Dollie? Is that you, dear?'

'I'm afraid that you have the wrong number,' began Jemima. 'There's no Dollie here.'

'Is that
6368471?'
quavered the voice. Jemima glanced at the dial.

'Yes, but this is a new flat: the number must have been reallocated.'

Jemima had just said again: 'There's no Dollie here', when she suddenly remembered, feeling rather remorseful, that Chloe Fontaine's mother always called her Dollie. Jemima, having been at Cambridge with Chloe, was dimly aware of this fact. As far as she could remember Chloe, formerly Dorothy or Dollie, had changed her name on arrival at Cambridge but, as she occasionally complained, had never succeeded in getting her somewhat elderly mother to acknowledge the fact.