Death of a Mystery Writer (22 page)

The other report that Meredith studied with particular interest
was that of the clientele of the Prince Albert that Saturday night eleven days before. The frequenters of the saloon bar had been only too willing to come forward: there was a long list, with addresses, all of which had been followed up, scattered though they were geographically. The policeman doing the checking up had recorded (with appropriate professional detachment) all the various frills and furbelows on the basic facts which the various witnesses indulged in: “His eyes were glowing with maniac fury,” young Miss Vanessa Corbett had explained; “He brandished a table knife in Jack Larkin's face, and then plunged it into the table,” said another romantic soul. The policeman reporting all this allowed himself the luxury of a few exclamation marks in the margin.

But what interested Meredith was mainly who was there at the time—and here the reports were not as satisfactory as he would have liked: they did not, that is, confirm a little guess he had made to himself. But he had often found that people who had a bit to drink could remember much more than they thought, if you could only find the thing to trigger their memories. He would have, he thought, to find the right sort of trigger. He looked down the list, trying to select the most likely witness for the sort of experiment he had in mind.

 • • • 

It was nearly half past ten by the time they had driven into Wiltshire and found the village of Lorstone. Meredith left both his car and his driver at the little prewar council house that doubled as a police station. He had seldom found that an ostentatious display of strength had a very positive effect on a witness, and he certainly didn't think it would have one on the witness he was going to interview now. He would, he told the local constable, walk to the cottage, if he would be so kind as to direct him.

It was only a few minutes' walk, and Meredith paused by a tree, unseen, to look at the cottage before he went up to the door. It was very unlike the Woodstocks' tarted-up little pair of laborers' dwellings. It was a single, one-story cottage, and—as Meredith had guessed from the newspaper photograph—in a very
dilapidated condition. The gate was swinging open on its hinges, the garden was a tangle of weeds and sprawling bushes, the roof lacked slates. If Ben Woodstock was the aspirant man of letters at the beginning of his career, with a cottage to match, this hovel was the mirror of such a career as it coughed and wheezed its way to a dispirited close.

As he watched, the owner came out. He locked the door, clumsily, as if it was not something he was used to doing, then he pottered along toward the front gate. Meredith looked at his watch. It was a couple of minutes to opening time.

Darcy Howard, when he came toward Meredith, looked no more impressive than he had in the newspaper picture: if the remains of an aristocratic manner were there at all, they were in so wispy and wraithlike a state as only to highlight the other dominant impressions to be gained from the man's face and clothes. Darcy Howard was not quite clean, and his clothes smelled of tobacco and taprooms. His walk was a shuffle, and he looked around with a sort of roguish furtiveness, as if for acquaintances who could still be touched for fifty pence. Underneath the general air of decay and seediness there was a little spark of light in his shifty eye. Meredith guessed he knew the reason: today, a rare occurrence, he had money in his pocket and another little nest egg in his cottage, and it came from Fleet Street.

He slipped out into Darcy Howard's path. “I'd like to talk to you,” he said.

“Oh, would you?” Darcy Howard's face achieved something close to a cheeky schoolboy's smirk: he really was pleased with himself. “Well, you'd better tell me what's it worth to you, hadn't you? People have to buy my time these days.”

Meredith pulled out his identification card. Howard peered at it, snuffling gently with disappointment. “I've got a half of gin in my pocket,” said Meredith, patting it. Darcy Howard looked wistfully in the direction of the local and sighed. But, apparently deciding that a free drink ought to take precedence over a bought one—one of the few principles held fast to in these last decades of his life—eventually he turned and led the way back to his cottage.

“Bit of a mess in here,” he said, in perfunctory apology. “The woman hasn't been in.”

No woman would want to. The place was a smelly slum.

Meredith sat down on a rickety wooden chair. “I'm following up that article you did for the
Clarion,”
he said.

“Got paid for that,” said Darcy Howard, baring his old teeth in a great chuckle of self-satisfaction. “Well, too.”

“It was extremely interesting,” said Meredith diplomatically. “But of course you had to feed them some of the usual good stories—the Oliver Fairleigh routine. I thought we might get a little closer to what he actually was like at the time you knew him.”

Darcy Howard digested this slowly, and then looked at Meredith in his cunning, bloodshot way. “Of course, you give them what they want,” he said, grandly general. “You don't tell the whole truth. You lot do the same, don't you? ‘The police are following up certain leads which they are convinced . . .' sounds better than ‘The police are thrashing around in the dark.' The newspapers wanted the usual routine, so I dredged up a few stories. Made up one of them myself. It's natural. Especially as there was money involved.” Darcy Howard cast his eye significantly around his unattractive little piece of real estate. Then for the first time he looked Meredith straight in the eye: “You said you had a half of gin,” he said.

With a sigh which said that he had hoped the interview might be conducted with more of an eye to police standing orders, Meredith took out the bottle, and Darcy Howard jumped up with something close to alacrity and got two smeary glasses and a milk jug of water. Meredith made his a small one, but Darcy Howard didn't.

“The point is, really,” said Meredith, sipping warily, “that from your point of view you knew Oliver Fairleigh at the wrong time, didn't you? It was only later in life that he developed this . . . personality that so fascinated everybody and you didn't in fact have much contact with him in later years, did you?”

“Not a great deal,” said Darcy Howard.

“Not much after his marriage, I gathered.”

“Oh, we met, of course. But not a great deal, as I say.”

“That was odd, wasn't it? In view of the fact that he married your—what—niece ?”

“Not so odd. Eleanor comes from the respectable side of the family. Nice people, but stiff, you know. I was always the black sheep. They met at my place. Not here”—he gestured round, again, as if to imply that even he would not sink to inviting his niece to such a dump—“in London. After the war. Anyway, they married. Good catch for Oliver. But they hadn't much use for me after that. Oliver decided to become a country gentleman. I'd served my turn.”

“So you knew him mostly in the thirties and during the war?”

“That's it,” said Darcy, apparently relieved that the clock had been turned back to the period before his casting-off. “Bright boy he was then. Up-and-coming. So was I. More than that. I had talent, by God I had.” He gestured toward the rough shelf full of books in the corner. “Anthologies. Poetry of the thirties. There's hardly one of those that hasn't one of mine in it. Worth a mint of money today, some of those books.” His tone was as unconvinced as Meredith felt it ought to be. However, he forbore to ask what went wrong. Lack of fulfillment is doubtless as painful to the untalented as to the talented. He just said: “Of course, Oliver Fairleigh was a Socialist at that time . . .”

“Of course he was. We all were. All the bright boys. He had it worse than some. You'll find that when the old families go in for socialism”—he turned his profile in Meredith's direction, as if it were distinguished enough to be stamped on the coin of the realm—“we do it with a bit of
style,
we keep our sense of proportion. Now Oliver, he was what I'd call industrial aristocracy, and when they get it, they tend to go the whole hog. Like Mr. Benn, you know. Trade union banners in the living room and eternal thick mugs of strong tea. Not a bit of discretion, had Oliver, no sense of the ridiculous. Which was as well,” he added, with Olympian spite, “because he was ridiculous much of the time.”

“So he was very committed in the thirties, was he?”

“Oh, yes—the Peace Pledge, Republican Spain, Jarrow marches—the lot.”

“When did you notice him changing?” Meredith sensed, so imperceptibly he couldn't be sure it was so, a slight stiffening in Darcy Howard.

“Well, of course we lost touch, naturally,” he said, not answering the question but gesturing grandly. “We had quite a little group going in the thirties.” He reeled off a series of names that meant nothing to Meredith. “We had the same sort of aims as the Auden group, but we were more hetero. Oliver kept in with us, and with them. Funny to think about it now. He was quite good at keeping in with people at that time. Must have been saving himself up.”

“But it was in the war he changed, wasn't it? And you did serve with him, didn't you?”

“If you like to put it that way. We lost touch round about nineteen forty, when he joined up. Of course I did my bit in different ways. Anyway, we met up in Sicily in forty-three, and we kept bumping into each other on and off for the next few years. He was still a Socialist in forty-three, or called himself one. But I think the bloom was wearing off, even then.”

“Why?”

Darcy Howard hesitated. “Well, he was always a drawing room pinkie, you know. He could throw dogmas and slogans and theories around with the rest of us, but in point of fact he understood very little of them, and as far as contact with the working-class movement was concerned, he hadn't any. He knew nothing whatsoever about it. Well, in the army he met up with the workers.” Darcy Howard once more forced out his wheezy chuckle. “I think he discovered they didn't know their place. He did some lecturing—on left-wing topics. They didn't accept his opinions as gospel. He didn't like it. He was always opinionated, was our Oliver from Brummagem.” Darcy Howard attempted a Birmingham accent, unwisely. Then he handed his glass over to
Meredith to be refilled with the air of a man who is giving value for money, and then settled back with his glass into his chair, as if his side of the conversation were more or less over and he had told everything he knew.

“There was no incident, then, that was crucial to his change of mind?” asked Meredith. Perhaps he let a note of urgency creep into his voice; at any rate he sensed again a slight stiffening in Howard which suggested that he was walking carefully.

“No, no, not that I know of,” he said, sipping his gin. “As I say, it seemed to have been coming on gradually. There was once—sometime in forty-four it must have been—he was invalided back home, after Monte Cassino. There wasn't anything much wrong with him. It was really three months' leave to write propaganda pieces on the battle aimed at the popular market—and
that
didn't please our Oliver. He thought he was more of an
Observer
writer, but they'd got his measure. Anyway, he hadn't anywhere much to go. His father was in hospital—mental home, just between ourselves—and there wasn't any other family. I put my London flat at his disposal, but I believe he also spent some time up north—with a private in his regiment he'd struck up some kind of friendship with.” Darcy Howard chuckled again, but uneasily, as if aware that Meredith was looking at him very closely. “It didn't work out, I believe. That was Oliver's first real taste of working-class life. It only lasted a few days. He told me later he loathed it. Loathed
them.
He never said much about the class struggle after that.” It was clear that Darcy Howard took immense spiteful pleasure from the story. But then he paused, and—as if thinking he'd gone too far—said: “But as I say, he'd been rethinking his position for a long time. Oh, yes, I'd seen it coming on.”

Meredith looked at the cagey old crook, dissatisfied with the progress of the interview. Howard was giving away just so much, and no more. On the off chance, he said: “He had affairs too at this time, didn't he?” Howard opened his eyes quickly, then closed them again.

“Oh, Oliver always had the odd girl in tow, you know. There
was always someone or other in the old days back in London. Pretty dire types, mostly—long matted hair and chunky beads, quoting Freud or Stalin or an unholy mixture of the two. Not my style at all, I can tell you. I'm afraid I can't help you there.”

“I meant in Italy,” said Meredith. “Or perhaps when he was on leave.”

“Couldn't say, old man. You know what it was like then—well, no, you wouldn't—too young—but it
was.”
Seeing Meredith looking at him and perhaps feeling himself that he had been less than clear, he added: “Well, you'd meet up for a couple of days, have a bit of a ball, you know, and then he'd be posted to Rome, and you'd be sent to liaise with Pisa, and you wouldn't see each other for a couple of months. That's how it was. I didn't know anything about Oliver's private life. Didn't concern me. Had a real little Neopolitan spitfire myself at that time. Still get a Christmas card from her. Runs a tourist hotel near Naples. Such is life. I expect Oliver had something of that sort on the side too.”

“You certainly implied that the girl in the picture was—”

“Oh, one does. Have to make a good story for the press boys. Don't remember the girl from Adam—or Eve, rather.”

“But you must have
known—”

“Good heavens, man, why? Oliver was nothing special at that time. Whereas I”—Darcy Howard smiled with the irony and the sense of the ridiculous that he had also brought to his left-wing politics—“I was a promising poet.”