An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (14 page)

Was it Cordelia’s imagination that the girl suddenly seemed more relaxed, that she was relieved at the innocuousness of the question?

“I just called to see Mark. They gave me his address at the College Lodge. I went to visit him.”

“Why?”

The harsh question seemed to puzzle her. She replied simply: “I wanted to be with him. He was my friend.”

“Was he your lover too?” asked Cordelia. This brutal frankness was surely better than asking whether they had slept together, or gone to bed together—stupid euphemisms which Isabelle might not even understand; it was hard to tell from those beautiful but frightened eyes just how much she did understand.

“No, Mark was never my lover. He was working in the garden and I had to wait for him at the cottage. He gave me a chair in the sun and a book until he was free.”

“What book?”

“I don’t remember, it was very dull. I was dull too until Mark came. Then we had tea with funny mugs that had a blue band, and after tea we went for a walk and then we had supper. Mark made a salad.”

“And then?”

“I drove home.”

She was perfectly calm now. Cordelia pressed on, aware of the sound of footsteps passing up and down the stairs, of the ring of voices. “And the time before that? When did you see him before that tea party?”

“It was a few days before Mark left college. We went for a picnic in my car to the seaside. But first we stopped at a town—St. Edmunds town, is it?—and Mark saw a doctor.”

“Why? Was he ill?”

“Oh no, he was not ill, and he did not stay long enough for what you call it—an examination. He was in the house a few minutes only. It was a very poor house. I waited for him in the car, but not just outside the house, you understand.”

“Did he say why he went there?”

“No, but I do not think he got what he wanted. Afterwards he was sad for a little time, but then we went to the sea and he was happy again.”

She, too, seemed happy now. She smiled at Cordelia, her sweet, unmeaning smile. Cordelia thought: it’s just the cottage that terrifies her. She doesn’t mind talking about the living Mark. It’s his death she can’t bear to think about. And yet, this repugnance wasn’t born of personal grief. He had been her friend; he was sweet; she liked him. But she was getting on very well without him.

There was a knock at the door. Cordelia stood aside and Hugo came in. He lifted an eyebrow at Isabelle and, ignoring Cordelia, said: “It’s your party, ducky; coming down?”

“Cordelia wanted to talk to me about Mark.”

“No doubt. You told her, I hope, that you spent one day with him motoring to the sea and one afternoon and evening at Summertrees and that you haven’t seen him since.”

“She told me,” said Cordelia. “She was practically word perfect. I think she’s safe to be let out on her own now.”

He said easily: “You shouldn’t be sarcastic, Cordelia, it doesn’t suit you. Sarcasm is all right for some women, but not for women who are beautiful in the way that you are beautiful.”

They were passing down the stairs together to meet the hubbub in the hall. The compliment irritated Cordelia. She said: “I suppose that woman on the bed is Isabelle’s chaperone. Is she often drunk?”

“Mademoiselle de Congé? Not often as drunk as that, but I admit that she is seldom absolutely sober.”

“Then oughtn’t you to do something about it?”

“What should I do? Hand her over to the twentieth-century Inquisition—a psychiatrist like my father? What has she done to us to deserve that? Besides, she is tediously conscientious
on the few occasions when she’s sober. It happens that her compulsions and my interest coincide.”

Cordelia said severely: “That may be expedient but I don’t think it very responsible and it isn’t kind.”

He stopped in his tracks and turned towards her, smiling directly into her eyes. “Oh, Cordelia, you talk like the child of progressive parents who has been reared by a nonconformist nanny and educated at a convent school. I do like you!”

He was still smiling as Cordelia slipped away from them and infiltrated the party. She reflected that his diagnosis hadn’t been so very far wrong.

She helped herself to a glass of wine, then moved slowly round the room listening unashamedly to scraps of conversation, hoping to hear Mark’s name mentioned. She heard it only once. Two girls and a very fair, rather insipid young man were standing behind her. One of the girls said: “Sophie Tilling seems to have recovered remarkably quickly from Mark Callender’s suicide. She and Davie went to the cremation, did you know? Typical of Sophie to take her current lover to see the previous one incinerated. I suppose it gave her some kind of a kick.”

Her companion laughed.

“And little brother takes over Mark’s girl. If you can’t get beauty, money and brains, settle for the first two. Poor Hugo! He suffers from a sense of inferiority. Not quite handsome enough; not quite clever enough—Sophie’s First must have shaken him; not quite rich enough. No wonder he has to rely on sex to give him confidence.”

“And, even there, not quite …”

“Darling, you should know.”

They laughed and moved away. Cordelia felt her face burning. Her hand shook, almost spilling her wine. She was
surprised to find how much she cared, how much she had come to like Sophie. But that, of course, was part of the plan, that was Tilling strategy. If you can’t shame her into giving up the case, suborn her; take her on the river; be nice to her; get her on our side. And it was true, she was on their side, at least against malicious detractors. She comforted herself with the censorious reflection that they were as bitchy as guests at a suburban cocktail party. She had never in her life attended one of those innocuous if boring gatherings for the routine consumption of gossip, gin and canapés but, like her father who had never attended one either, she found no difficulty in believing that they were hot beds of snobbery, spite and sexual innuendo.

A warm body was pressing against her. She turned and saw Davie. He was carrying three bottles of wine. He had obviously heard at least part of the conversation, as the girls had no doubt intended, but he grinned amiably.

“Funny how Hugo’s discarded women always hate him so much. It’s quite different with Sophie. Her ex-lovers clutter up Norwich Street with their beastly bicycles and broken-down cars. I’m always finding them in the sitting room drinking my beer and confiding to her the awful trouble they’re having with their present girls.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not if they don’t get any further than the sitting room. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Not very much.”

“Come and meet a friend of mine. He’s been asking who you are.”

“No thank you, Davie. I must keep myself free for Mr. Horsfall. I don’t want to miss him.”

He smiled at her, rather pityingly she thought, and seemed about to speak. But he changed his mind and moved away,
clutching the bottles to his chest and shouting a cheerful warning as he edged himself through the throng.

Cordelia worked her way around the room, watching and listening. She was intrigued by the overt sexuality; she had thought that intellectuals breathed too-rarified air to be much interested in the flesh. Obviously this was a misapprehension. Come to think of it, the comrades, who might have been supposed to live in randy promiscuity, had been remarkably staid. She had sometimes felt that their sexual activities were prompted more by duty than instinct, more a weapon of revolution or a gesture against the bourgeois mores they despised than a response to human need. Their basic energies were all devoted to politics. It was not difficult to see where most of the energies of those present were directed.

She needn’t have worried about the success of the kaftan. A number of men showed themselves willing or even eager to detach themselves from their partners for the pleasure of talking to her. With one particularly, a decorative and ironically amusing young historian, Cordelia felt that she could have spent an entertaining evening. To enjoy the sole attention of one agreeable man and no attention at all from anyone else was all she ever hoped from a party. She wasn’t naturally gregarious and, alienated by the last six years from her own generation, found herself intimidated by the noise, the underlying ruthlessness and the half-understood conventions of these tribal matings. And she told herself firmly that she wasn’t here to enjoy herself at Sir Ronald’s expense. None of her prospective partners knew Mark Callender or showed any interest in him, dead or alive. She mustn’t get herself tied for the evening to people who had no information to give. When this seemed a danger and the talk became too beguiling, she would murmur her excuses and slip away to the bathroom or
into the shadows of the garden where little groups were sitting on the grass smoking pot. Cordelia couldn’t be mistaken in that evocative smell. They showed no disposition to chat and here, at least, she could stroll in privacy gaining courage for the next foray, for the next artfully casual question, the next inevitable response.

“Mark Callender? Sorry—we never met. Didn’t he go off to sample the simple life and end by hanging himself or something?”

Once she took refuge in Mademoiselle de Congé’s room, but she saw that the inert figure had been unceremoniously dumped on a cushion of pillows on the carpet and that the bed was being occupied for quite another purpose.

She wondered when Edward Horsfall would arrive or whether he would arrive at all. And if he did, would Hugo remember or bother to introduce her? She couldn’t see either of the Tillings in the hot crush of gesticulating bodies which by now had crammed the sitting room and spilled into the hall and halfway up the stairs. She was beginning to feel that this would be a wasted evening when Hugo’s hand fell on her arm. He said: “Come and meet Edward Horsfall. Edward, this is Cordelia Gray; she wants to talk about Mark Callender.”

Edward Horsfall was another surprise. Cordelia had subconsciously conjured up the picture of an elderly don, a little distrait with the weight of his learning, a benevolent if detached mentor of the young. Horsfall could not have been much over thirty. He was very tall, his hair falling long over one eye, his lean body curved as a melon rind, a comparison reinforced by the pleated yellow shirtfront under a jutting bow tie.

Any half-acknowledged, half-shameful hope which Cordelia may have nourished that he would immediately take to her and be happily ungrudging of his time so long as they
were together was quickly dispersed. His eyes were restless, flicking obsessively back to the door. She suspected that he was alone by choice, deliberately keeping himself free from encumbrances until the hoped-for companion arrived. He was so fidgety that it was difficult not to be fretted by his anxiety. She said: “You don’t have to stay with me all the evening you know, I only want some information.”

Her voice recalled him to an awareness of her and to some attempt at civility. “That wouldn’t exactly be a penance. I’m sorry. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me about Mark. You taught him history, didn’t you? Was he good at it?”

It wasn’t a particularly relevant question but one which she felt all teachers might respond to as a start.

“He was more rewarding to teach than some students I’m afflicted with. I don’t know why he chose history. He could very well have read one of the sciences. He had a lively curiosity about physical phenomenon. But he decided to read history.”

“Do you think that was to disoblige his father?”

“To disoblige Sir Ronald?” He turned and stretched out an arm for a bottle. “What are you drinking? There’s one thing about Isabelle de Lasterie’s parties, the drink is excellent, presumably because Hugo orders it. There’s an admirable absence of beer.”

“Doesn’t Hugo drink beer then?” asked Cordelia.

“He claims not to. What were we talking about? Oh, yes, disobliging Sir Ronald. Mark said that he chose history because we have no chance of understanding the present without understanding the past. That’s the sort of irritating cliché people come out with at interviews, but he may have believed it. Actually, of course, the reverse is true: we interpret the past through our knowledge of the present.”

“Was he any good?” asked Cordelia. “I mean, would he have got a First?”

A First, she naïvely believed, was the ultimate in scholastic achievement, the certificate of pronounced intelligence that the recipient carried unchallenged through life. She wanted to hear that Mark was safe for a First.

“Those are two separate and distinct questions. You seem to be confusing merit with achievement. Impossible to predict his class, hardly a First. Mark was capable of extraordinarily good and original work but he limited his material to the number of his original ideas. The result tended to be rather thin. Examiners like originality but you’ve got to spew up the accepted facts and orthodox opinions first if only to show that you’ve learnt them. An exceptional memory and fast, legible handwriting; that’s the secret of a First. Where are you, incidentally?” He noticed Cordelia’s brief look of incomprehension. “At what college?”

“None; I work. I’m a private detective.”

He took this information in his stride. “My uncle employed one of those once to find out if my aunt was being screwed by their dentist. She was, but he could have found out more easily by the simple expedient of asking them. His way, he lost the services of a wife and of a dentist simultaneously and paid through the nose for information he could have got for nothing. It made quite a stir in the family at the time. I should have thought that the job was—”

Cordelia finished the sentence for him.

“An unsuitable job for a woman?”

“Not at all. Entirely suitable I should have thought, requiring, I imagine, infinite curiosity, infinite pains and a penchant for interfering with other people.” His attention was wandering again. A group near to them were talking and snatches of the conversation came to them.

“—typical of the worst kind of academic writing. Contempt for logic; a generous sprinkling of vogue names; spurious profundity and bloody awful grammar.”

The tutor gave the speakers a second’s attention, dismissed their academic chat as beneath his notice and condescended to transfer his attention but not his regard back to Cordelia. “Why are you so interested in Mark Callender?”