Death of a Mystery Writer (7 page)

“But you can't like living in
squalor,”
protested his mother pleadingly.

“Of course he does,” came the genial roar from the head of the table. Oliver Fairleigh was gazing in their direction with an expression of fearsome good cheer on his face, like a field marshal visiting the Christmas Day dinner in the NCOs' mess.
“Everyone should live in squalor when they're young. Eh, Ben? I'm sure you did, before you did the sensible thing and got yourself married.”

“Well,” said Ben weakly, “I'm not a
tidy
person. . . .”

“I should hope not. Filthy, I shouldn't wonder. That's what makes people get married—being fed up with it. Don't let your mother provide you with dusters and vacuum cleaners, Mark, my boy. She cleaned me up, but she shouldn't try it on you. Squalor is part of a writer's stock-in-trade.”

“I'm not a writer,” said Mark thickly.

“I know, my boy,” said his father equably. “I was referring to myself. Though stranger things have happened, of course. . . .”

“I'd rather die than be a writer,” went on Mark, oblivious of the pressure of his mother's hand on his right sleeve. “Bloodless, sadistic bastards. Always taking people apart, pretending to understand—God, they're the last people to understand.” His great, dark-rimmed eyes watered with self-pity, and he looked with dull resentment at his father. “Self-satisfied oafs,” he said. “Think themselves bloody little gods. Playing with people . . . never leaving people alone . . . I'd rather die than be . . . than be a . . . writer.”

He subsided into a comatose silence, and looked at his untasted dessert. He had effectively doused the festive atmosphere. Oliver Fairleigh's eyes glinted dangerously as he looked in his direction, and there was an edge to his voice as he tried—in a parody of the tactful host's manner—to fill in the surrounding silence.

“Of course he has a point,” he said generally, looking round the table. “Wouldn't you agree, Woodstock? We are a pretty bloodless lot, I suppose—watching people, storing it all away. Eh? All the little details that fall into place later, all the little mannerisms that give people away. It must seem a pretty inhuman sort of existence, to people outside the charmed circle.” He lowered his voice, and addressed Celia Woodstock alone: “He's had a little bit more than is good for him, you know. Not used to it.” And then, as conversation seemed to be slow in starting up around the rest of the table, he said: “Shall we adjourn to the library? Surtees has
put out the coffee there. I've one or two things I'd like to show your husband, my dear—he'll have to humor a bibliophile's whims for a little while, I'm afraid.”

They all got up, the Woodstocks saying all the right things, and the little party trooped off toward the library. With one exception. As they reached the door they noticed that Mark had sunk back into his place, and his head was beginning to fall forward onto his chest.

Bella went back and leaned over him.

“Come on, Mark. Dinner's over. Come and have some coffee. That'll buck you up.”

There were clotted mutterings from Mark that sounded like obscenities. Bella started to lift him.

“Leave him, Bella,” said her father, his voice dangerously close to a shout. “Best to let him come to on his own.”

“Oh, no, Daddy. This is the best part of the dinner. Mark will have to be in on it.” And Bella and Terence between them stood Mark up, and—staggering slightly, for Mark was not a small man—they hoisted him across the hall and into the library. Once they had him there they let him sink into an easy chair by the door, where he promptly went to sleep, if he had ever wakened.

The study was large, luxurious, and dark, lined with cupboards and bookcases, whose contents were predominantly brown and nineteenth-century looking, though there were two shelves over the desk which contained a long line of books in gaudier dust jackets, no doubt the host's own collected works. The desk itself was an enormous, heavy Victorian affair, and was open.

“My goodness!” said Oliver Fairleigh, looking at it. “This is a surprise!”

It was piled high with presents, large and small, all wrapped in luxurious sorts of wrapping paper.

“My husband is a terrible child,” whispered Eleanor Fairleigh to Celia Woodstock. “He loves presents. We put them here every year, and he always pretends to be surprised.”

Oliver Fairleigh had capered over to the presents and was rummaging around in the pile with little porcine snuffles of glee.
“‘From Bella, with love!' Goodness me! It's quite heavy. What can it be? From Terence, this one: what a nice
big
parcel. It can't be handkerchiefs, that's a blessing. Leave handkerchiefs for people who like picking their noses. This is Eleanor's—it rattles. What can
that
be? Cuff links, perhaps? Not a lighter, anyway. I'm not supposed to smoke, Celia, my dear”—he drew Mrs. Woodstock into the family group by the hand—“and my wife would regard a lighter as an encouragement. And here's one from Miss Cozzens. How very friendly. Perhaps I should have invited her to be with us tonight. Do you think it was remiss of me, Eleanor, my dear? Will she hold it against me?”

Oliver Fairleigh's voice trailed away as he finished inspecting the pile of presents. There was an awkwardness as everyone realized that there seemed to be one lacking. Oliver Fairleigh looked toward Mark. He said nothing. Then, rubbing his hands, he flashed his teeth into a rather frightening smile—Celia Woodstock remembered last Sunday, and shivered suddenly—and said:

“Now, Eleanor, if you'll be so good as to see to the coffee, I'll pour the liqueurs.”

“Oh, Oliver, should you? Why don't you open your presents first?”

Oliver Fairleigh looked longingly at the decanters along the shelf of the open cupboard behind the desk, and longingly at the presents in their gaudy pile. The presents won.

“Well, well,” he said; “perhaps if I just took a peep . . .”

The world is divided into those who eat their meat first, and those who eat their vegetables. Oliver Fairleigh was decidedly of the former type. Ignoring Miss Cozzens's small, square box, he dived for Bella's present, and handled it lovingly: a substantial, heavy, and interesting parcel. His podgy fingers struggled with the wrapping, and when he had got it off he dived down to look at the contents, screening them from the gaze of the little knot of people round him. Little snorts of delight and appreciation were heard, and ecstatic shakings of the shoulders.

“Look!” he said. “Look!” The others regarded this as license
to swoop down around him, only Bella standing a little aloof, smiling to herself.
“Caleb Williams,”
said Oliver Fairleigh. “The first edition. What a find!” He straightened and turned to Celia Woodstock. “It's the first detective story, you know, or more or less. Bella, my dear, you are a dreadful daughter. You must have spent three months' salary. I have an awful presentiment that I shall be forced to subsidize my own birthday present.”

He kissed her heartily, and she put her arms elegantly around his thick publican's neck.

“You're very unfair, Daddy. I haven't asked you for a penny since I started work.”

“That,” said Oliver Fairleigh, who never lost his realism in money matters, “is because you know how to work me up to offering it whenever you find you need it.”

Terence's present was a substantial and handsome silk dressing gown, beamingly received. Eleanor's was indeed cuff links, traditional and solid, and she was given a husbandly kiss of thanks. Miss Cozzens's was handkerchiefs.

“Oh, how fortunate I
didn't
ask her tonight,” said Sir Oliver. “It would have been very embarrassing. What could I have said? You know, one of her great advantages as a secretary is that she has no imagination, so it would be very ungrateful of me to complain.”

By now the group around the desk had dispersed around the room, and Sir Oliver surveyed them all with a cheek-popping beam on his face.

“A wonderful birthday,” he said genially. “The best for years. So kind of you, Celia and Ben, to come and share it with us.” He turned and took a cigar from a box on top of the desk, ignoring an inarticulate protest from his wife. “Tomorrow we must go out somewhere—for a meal, or a drink. I feel the need to spend something on my family, after all their generosity.” He lit his cigar, and puffed away at it appreciatively. “Where shall we go? I hear the Prince Albert at Hadley is one of the places people go these days.”

There was a sudden silence in the study. Eleanor's heart seemed suddenly to suspend operations. Oliver Fairleigh was
looking genially in the direction of his elder son, but if he hoped for a reaction, he was disappointed. Mark, deep in sleep and deep in his chair, gave little sign of life beyond the slight regular rise and fall of his chest. For a few seconds the host of the evening savored the silence in the room, savored the infinitesimal look of inquiry that passed from his daughter Bella to his son Terence, noticed that the embarrassment of the Woodstocks made it perfectly clear that the village gossip had got to them. Then he rubbed his hands and turned back to the desk.

“Now, Eleanor, perhaps you will pour the coffee. If it's cold you must blame me. Liqueurs, everybody?”

From the low cupboard just above the desk Oliver Fairleigh took a series of decanters and bottles.

“I love liqueurs,” he said happily to Celia Woodstock, as if in an attempt to restore the happy atmosphere. “It's deplorable, but I'm afraid I have to admit to a sweet tooth. What will you have, my dear? Cointreau? Grenadine? Or what about my own special favorite—it's called lakka. You won't have heard of it. It's Finnish, and it's made from cloudberries—quite delicious.”

He took the stopper from a decanter with a small quantity of yellow liqueur in it.

“It's awfully sweet, disgustingly sweet,” said Eleanor. “You might not like it. We have to get it specially from the Finnish Tourist place. I'm sure no one else in Britain drinks it.”

“I think you may be right,” chortled Oliver Fairleigh happily. “Except expatriate Finns with sweet tooths, or should that be sweet teeth?” Everyone smiled nervously. It was now clear to all, even the nonfamily members, that it would not do to be too sure of their man. “Now, my dear?” he inquired, smiling ingratiatingly at Celia Woodstock.

“I think I would prefer Cointreau,” she said in the nervous voice of one who knows nothing about liqueurs, and does not expect to like them.

“Very well, Cointreau it shall be; and the same for Eleanor—” Oliver Fairleigh poured a succession of little glasses and handed
them round. By now they had all managed to seat themselves around the heavy, glowering study, except for Ben Woodstock, who had been drawn to the bookshelves—or perhaps who had felt he ought to show an interest in his host's collection. After handing a glass of Drambuie to Terence, Oliver Fairleigh looked at his elder son, still comatose in his armchair at the far end of the room.

“We'll leave him for a little,” he said, as if Mark were an underdone roast, and turned back to pour himself a little glass of thick yellow liqueur from a rather fine cut-glass decanter.

“Now,” he said—but before he could propose a toast, his wife and daughter both said, “Happy birthday, Oliver!” and they all raised their glasses, or in some cases their coffee cups, to him. With a contented expression on his face, relishing, as always, being the center of attention, Oliver Fairleigh drank his lakka. He drew together his formidable eyebrows. He pushed his tongue experimentally through his lips. He let out a grunt—expostulatory, bass, frightening, but finishing in an odd, questioning little whimper. He fell heavily to the floor.

“Oliver! My God! I knew this would happen.” His wife had jumped from her chair, upsetting the table beside it and the coffee cup on it. She dashed over to the bulbous, collapsed figure by the desk. “Surtees! Someone get Surtees! Ring for an ambulance, quickly!”

She was hardly on her knees beside her husband when Surtees dashed into the room.

“What is it? I was passing—” He saw Lady Fairleigh on the floor, and ran over to where she was, finally seeing the body, moaning and feebly thrashing around. “Water. Get some water.” He threw some flowers from a vase on a side table to the floor, spread the body of Oliver Fairleigh out lengthways, and dashed the water into his face.

“For heaven's sake, man, it's not a faint or a fit,” said Lady Fairleigh. “Get him up. He's supposed to sit up.”

“This is Wycherley Court,” said Terence in an unnaturally high
voice into the phone. “Will you send an ambulance at once. It's my father—Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs. Quickly, please. He's had some sort of attack.” He pressed down the receiver rest, and immediately began dialing again.

“He doesn't seem able to breathe,” said Eleanor Fairleigh. “What should we do?” She looked at Surtees, who was trying to prop up the immense bulk of his employer in a sitting position, and was sweating with the effort. “Perhaps we should lay him down after all,” his wife said. “I'm sure he would be more comfortable. Do you think we should try massaging his heart?”

“Dr. Leighton? It's Terence Fairleigh. Dad has had an attack—heart, I think. Can you come? . . . Yes, he is, but he's in a bad way. I've called for an ambulance. . . . Yes, please hurry.”

Terence Fairleigh put down the phone. “He'll be here right away,” he said. “He said that was what he was afraid of.”

He looked at the three figures on the floor, and then turned round to look at his sister. She was standing a few feet from her father, seeming as usual to carry a quality of remoteness with her, but her eyes were awash with tears, and her mouth was twitching.

“Mummy,” she said. “I'll go with him in the ambulance. You'll only upset yourself.”