Farthing (20 page)

It always struck me as the very worst form to have a Bognor baby.

“Well she’ll get away with that now,” Eddie said, running her finger down Shakespeare’s nose.

“But she was asking Marion Stepney a fortnight ago if she knew who to go to when you wanted to bring a baby off, and that isn’t the sort of thing she’d want to do if it was her husband’s baby.

Marion told me that

Angela told her they had separate bedrooms and she wouldn’t get away with it.”

“Marion was probably romancing,” I said, though I didn’t believe it. Marion was a silly woman, but she did have a reputation for sailing close to the wind and being a little racy. She was exactly the person

Angela would go to if she wanted to find out about abortions.

“She wasn’t, though she told me in strictest confidence and I haven’t told a soul. I assumed you’d know, after spending absolutely all day closeted with her yesterday.” She tapped ash off her cigarette into the ashtray on the piano.

“She didn’t say a word to make me doubt her,” I said. “And you’d better not go spreading that story.”

“Oh, it was obviously that Bolshevik who killed him, not Angela,” Eddie said. “I can’t picture Angela stabbing him, can you? Not really her style at all.” She sighed and twisted a curl of her hair around her finger. “I felt sure you’d know. I can’t ask her, and Daphne’s worse than useless, going about like

Ophelia.”

“Poor Daphne,” I said.

“Yes, she’ll have to find herself another lover now,” Eddie said, callously.

“Has she been involved with Sir James all this time?” I asked.

“Since she was barely out,” Eddie said, blowing out smoke. “I’m surprised you know about that; you’d hardly have been out of the cradle. They married her off to Mark, and gave him a safe seat into the bargain. Now if he’d died when Sir James was free to marry, that would have made me suspicious! But he didn’t, and however much he looked the other way about the Daphne thing, he wasn’t going to give her a divorce. No politician would. So Sir James married Angela. Every politician wants a wife to do their entertaining, never mind who they sleep with. That’s why I broke up with Rex—I could see he didn’t want me, he wanted a political hostess. And if I want to be a political hostess, I can be one for

Daddy, who will, frankly, do better in politics than poor Rex ever will. I’ll marry for love, or for considerably better advantage than Rex would bring me.”

“I knew about Daphne and Sir James long ago, but I didn’t know it went on,” I said. “How well known is it?”

“Not as well known as all that,” Eddie said, consideringly, lighting another cigarette. “I believe there was a time when it was off, when he first married Angela, but then it was on again. They kept it pretty dark, and Daphne’s never been a particular friend of mine. Not as dark as Angela’s affair, though. I do wonder who it could have been?”

“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. There was no malice in Eddie

Cheriton, but precious little good either. She was one of the parasites and time-wasters I wanted nothing to do with, and her tongue was hinged in the middle and flapped at both ends.

“Well, I’d better take a book or people might wonder,” she said, picking up something at random from a shelf and blowing dust off it.

“Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory. Whatever is it? Oh, is it some of that Ossian stuff?”

“Something like that,” I said. “I don’t know why you expect me to have read every book in the house.”

“Are you saying Billy isn’t to be trusted?” she asked, laughing and tucking the book under her arm. “You were quite right not to marry him anyway, he’s an idiot, and the nobility is quite sufficiently inbred as it is.

Although you needn’t have taken eugenics quite as far in the opposite direction!” She laughed again, and went out.

I stood in the library grinding my teeth for a little while, then I went off to the billiards room, where I

found Mark leaning against a pillar looking elegant while watching David and Tibs finishing their game. I

looked at him covertly. Was he really Athenian, and quite happy for his wife to have spent the last fifteen years or so having an affair with someone else? Or did he resent her affair? He seemed glad to see her unhappy. And if he’d resented it, might he have hated Thirkie and allied himself with Bolsheviks to arrange his death? He laughed at one of Tibs’s feeble jokes, and I couldn’t quite believe it, but I couldn’t quite put it out of my mind either. I’d always rather liked him.

I watched David knocking balls about and joking in that very male, English way, which I knew wasn’t natural to him but which he could put on so well when he was with people like that. He thought it would make them accept him, and I couldn’t tell him that nothing he did would make the slightest difference to that. We had real friends, I thought; we shouldn’t waste our time with these people. Tibs won, barely, and began a game with Mark. David and I went up to bed, and all the way I was thinking triumphantly:

Tomorrow we’re going home, we’re escaping, we’re getting out of here and going back to our own life, and I’ll never think about any of this again if I can help it.

We made love. And as David exploded, and I did, I knew. In the still small place that was the center of all that lovely shuddery excitement, in a place deep inside me that I visualized as being like the heart of a red flower, with big shivery pink petals whose lips reached all the way out, two seeds found each other, and started to grow into a baby. I kept very still, hugging David, loving him more than ever, though I all at once understood what it is that pregnant women always look so smug about.

18

Carmichael woke early beneath the embroidered exhortation, “Hold fast to that which is good.”

Fresh eggs did imply a rooster, but did it have to be a demented rooster bound on waking the whole world? It was joined by the whistle of the 6:35 from London to Southampton. Carmichael gave it a judicious ten minutes, then rang the bell and asked the sleepy maid for tea, hot water, and today’s papers if they had arrived yet. She brought them up while Carmichael was shaving.

He poured himself an indifferent cup of tea and got back into bed to survey the delights of the London press.

The Times led with the Bolshevik attack on Lord Eversley and Mrs. Kahn, almost in the words of Carmichael’s own press release. It suggested that more money for the Navy would prevent similar occurrences. The front page also mentioned that Foreign News, on page 4, would inform readers about starvation and cannibalism among the defenders of Stalingrad, and another Japanese massacre of insurgents in Shanghai. Carmichael was mildly astonished there was anyone left to starve in Stalingrad or to massacre in China, or that The Times could believe that anyone in England could care about them on a beautiful May morning. He tossed the paper down dismissively.

The

Telegraph talked about the Bolshevik menace, and seemed to take it for granted that the same man

who had attacked Lord Eversley had killed Sir James Thirkie. “Englishmen will not allow our policy to be set by armed anarchists in the pay of Soviet Russia!” the Leader screamed. The pictures were from the files: Lord and Lady Eversley opening a factory the year before, and Lucy Kahn at the time of her wedding. It went on to praise Lord Eversley’s marksmanship and police efficiency. The

Telegraph often praised police efficiency, except for the times when it called for the blood of some policeman who had not been efficient enough to suit it. Its own foreign news was a day behind

The Times;

it said that Kursk had changed hands again.

The

Manchester Guardian also quoted Carmichael extensively. It went so far as to show a picture of him, taken the day before, outside the gates of Farthing. It urged the House not to allow its natural sympathy for the Farthing Set in their misfortunes to overwhelm it in the vote this evening. Carmichael read that twice and thought hard about it, closing the paper without more than glancing at the foreign news headline: “Hitler’s work camps: are they really efficient?”

He went down to breakfast in a thoughtful frame of mind, and found Royston already at the table, reading the

Daily Herald.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“Bloody bird wouldn’t shut up,” Royston said. “I hate the country; you can keep it. Will we get back up to London today, sir?”

“I should think so,” Carmichael said. “What news?”

“Lord Eversley shot a Bolshevik, nation rejoices. And the police want to hear about anyone who
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saw a man on a motorcycle,” Royston summarized.

“How about the foreign news?” Carmichael sat down and rang for his breakfast.

“Foreign news?” Royston squinted at him suspiciously. “The Emperor of Japan is to visit President

Lindbergh in San Francisco to discuss closer economic ties between the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the USA. Oh, and Kursk changed hands again.”

“You’ve restored my faith in the papers, sergeant,” Carmichael said, as the landlady brought his breakfast. “I was beginning to think that the foreign news had no overlap whatsoever.”

“Why did you want to know?” Royston poked gingerly at a sausage.

“I wondered if this business, that looks at first blush as if it relates to British politics, might possibly relate more to politics in some other country, such as Soviet Russia, or possibly Nazi Germany. This theory would seem to be disproved, at least if one relies on the great British newspapers to tell you anything.”

“Anything interesting in the other papers?”

“The

Telegraph urges the country and the Tories to stand firm behind the Farthing Set, while the Manchester Guardian wants them not to be swayed by natural emotion into giving the Farthing Set too much power.”

“They’ve got too much bloody power already,” Royston grumbled, mopping up his egg yolk with his toast.

For the second day running, there was a fat envelope waiting for Carmichael at Farthing. “Check into the billiards thing,” he said to Royston. “Do it yourself, don’t let Yately do it, if Yately even bothers to show his face here this morning. Find out who remembers Normanby and Thirkie playing billiards, and what time it was.”

He opened the envelope. Before he could do more than glance at the top report, on Bolshevik activity, the telephone rang.

“Call from London for Inspector Carmichael, police priority,” the operator sang. Carmichael waited with the big clumsy receiver tucked between his ear and his shoulder, reading the report, a pen in his hand for taking notes. It seemed that Soviet, Bolshevik, Communist, and Trotskyist activity had been rather low of late, according to police sources, and there had been no rumors of planned assassinations or attacks.

“Is that you, Carmichael?” a voice barked in his ear.

“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, putting down the report, his heart sinking. Chief Inspector Penn-Barkis would telephone himself only with bad news, or if he meant to interfere.

“I’ve had calls from very high places about your keeping everyone penned up down at Farthing.

I didn’t give in to them, I said you could keep them there until ten this morning, but after that, anyone you don’t arrest is free to go. And better not be too enthusiastic about arrests, considering who these people are.

There’s nothing more to do down there—come back to London.”

“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, writing neatly on his notepad: “There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.”

“They’ve been told already,” Penn-Barkis said. “Do any last interviews you need to.”

“Yes, sir,” he repeated, drawing a box around what he had written.

“Come in and see me when you get back to the Yard.”

“Yes, sir,” Carmichael repeated. “Is that all?”

“No. Sergeant Stebbings wanted a word about the raid last night. I’ll put you through to him now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Carmichael said, automatically, drawing curlicues around the box and contemplating the words inside. If he’d told some factory workers or miners suspected of
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murder to stay at home where he could talk to them, nobody would have raised the slightest murmur.

“Stebbings here,” Stebbings said.

“Yes, Carmichael here, sergeant, what is it? Something on Brown?” He tapped his pen.

“Brown, or Guerin, doesn’t have a record here under either name. Nothing known. I’ve sent you down what we have. We’re investigating in Bethnal Green, where it seems someone of that name did live at that address. He lived alone, so there’s not much progress as yet.”

“Oh well,” Carmichael said, crosshatching the corners of his square.

“What I wanted to say, sir, was we found a link with the other man.”

“Which other man?” Carmichael asked.

“Kahn, sir. We went into his flat last night, tidy search, like you asked for. Nobody would know we’d touched a thing, but we turned it over properly.”

“Yes, yes, but what did you find?” Carmichael dropped his pen and it rolled over the table, sputtering ink.

“Very incriminating letters from a member of an underground Jewish group, urging him to revolutionary action and murder,” Stebbings said, as if he were remarking on the weather. “They didn’t mention this specific case, but they wanted him to find an opportunity to get Sir James Thirkie, Lord Eversley, Lord

Timothy Cheriton, and Mr. Normanby together and blow them up.”

“Were they blackmailing letters?” Carmichael asked. “Did they threaten, or say ‘Unless you do this we reveal something about you’? Or were they just encouraging him to do it?”

“The latter,” Stebbings said. “From the letters we have, it appears he kept refusing, but he continued to correspond with them and to send them money. We only have their half of the correspondence, but there’s a constant tone of ‘Thanks for the money but it isn’t enough, take action against this fascist family you’ve married into.” “

Kahn. He’d been completely wrong. Kahn all the time. He’d pulled the wool over his eyes properly.