Come to Grief Read online

  He said, “In the civil service I work in a small unacknowledged off-shoot department which was set up some time ago to foretell the probable outcome of any high political appointment. We also predict the future inevitable consequences of pieces of proposed legislation.” He paused and went on wryly, “We call ourselves the Cassandra outfit. We see what will happen and no one believes us. We are always on the lookout for exceptional independent investigators with no allegiances. They’re hard to find. We think you are one.”

  I stood beside my car in the dying light, looking into the extraordinary eyes. An extraordinary man of unimaginable insights. I said, “Archie, I’ll work for you to the limit as long as I’m sure you’re not sending me into a danger that you know exists but are not telling me about.”

  He took a deep breath but gave no undertaking.

  “Good night,” I said mildly.

  “Sid.”

  “I’ll phone you.” It was as firm a promise, I thought, as “let’s do lunch.”

  He was still standing on his gravel as I drove out through his gates. A true civil servant, I thought ruefully. No positive assurances could ever be given because the rules could at any time be changed under one’s feet. I drove north across Oxfordshire to Aynsford and rang the bell of the side entrance of Charles’s house. Mrs. Cross came in answer to the summons, her inquiring expression melting to welcome as she saw who had arrived.

  “The Admiral’s in the wardroom,” she assured me when I asked if he was at home, and she bustled along before me to give Charles the news.

  He made no reference to the fact that it was the second time in three days that I had sought his sanctuary. He merely pointed to the gold brocade chair and poured brandy into a tumbler without asking.

  I sat and drank and looked gratefully at the austerity and restraint of this thin man who’d commanded ships and was now my only anchor.

  “How’s the arm?” he asked briefly, and I said lightly, “Sore.”

  He nodded and waited.

  “Can I stay?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  After a longish pause, I said, “Do you know a man called Archibald Kirk?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He says he talked to you on the telephone. It was months ago, I think. He’s a civil servant and a magistrate. He lives near Hungerford, and I’ve come here from his house. Can you remember? Way back. I think he may have been asking you about me. Like sort of checking up, like a reference. You probably told him that I play chess.”

  He thought about it, searching for the memory.

  “I would always give you a good reference,” he said. “Is there any reason why you’d prefer I didn’t?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “I’ve been asked several times about your character and ability. I always say if they’re looking for an investigator they couldn’t do better.”

  “You’re ... very kind.”

  “Kind, my foot. Why do you ask about this Archibald Church?”

  “Kirk.”

  “Kirk, then.”

  I drank some brandy and said, “Do you remember that day you came with me to the Jockey Club? The day we got the head of the security section sacked?”

  “I could hardly forget it, could I?”

  “You didn’t tell Archie Kirk about it, did you?”

  “Of course not. I never talk about it. I gave you my word I wouldn’t.”

  “Someone has,” I said morosely.

  “The Jockey Club didn’t actually swear an oath of silence.”

  “I know.” I thought a bit and asked, “Do you know a barrister called Davis Tatum? He’s the head of chambers of the prosecuting counsel at Ellis’s trial.”

  “I know of him. Never met him.”

  “You’d like him. You’d like Archie, too.” I paused, and went on, “They both know about that day at the Jockey Club.”

  “But, Sid... does it really matter? I mean, you did the Jockey Club a tremendous favor, getting rid of their villain.”

  “Davis Tatum and, I’m sure, Archie, have engaged me to find out who is moving behind the scenes to get the Quint trial quashed. And I’m not telling you that.”

  He smiled. “Client confidentiality?”

  “Right. Well, Davis Tatum made a point of telling me that he knew all about the mandarins insisting I take off my shirt, and why. I think he and Archie are trying to reassure themselves that if they ask me to do something dangerous, I’ll do it.”

  He gave me a long, slow look, his features still and expressionless.

  Finally he said, “And will you?”

  I sighed. “Probably.”

  “What sort of danger?”

  “I don’t think they know. But realistically, if someone has an overwhelming reason for preventing Ellis’s trial from ever starting, who is the person standing chiefly in the way?”

  “Sid!”

  “Yes. So they’re asking me to find out if anyone might be motivated enough to ensure my permanent removal from the scene. They want me to find out if and who and why.”

  “God, Sid.”

  From a man who never blasphemed, those were strong words.

  “So . . . ,” I sighed, “Davis Tatum gave me a name, Owen Yorkshire, and told me he owned a firm called Topline Foods. Now Topline Foods gave a sponsored lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National. Ellis Quint was guest of honor. Also among the guests was a man called Lord Tilepit, who is both on the board , of Topline Foods and the proprietor of The Pump, which has been busy mocking me for months.”

  He sat as if frozen.

  “So,” I said, “I’ll go and see what Owen Yorkshire and Lord Tilepit are up to, and if I don’t come back you can kick up a stink.”

  When he’d organized his breath, he said, “Don’t do it, Sid.”

  “No . . . but if I don‘t, Ellis will walk out laughing, and my standing in the world will be down the tubes forever, if you see what I mean.”

  He saw.

  After a while he said, “I do vaguely remember talking to this Archie fellow. He asked about your brains. He said he knew about your physical resilience. Odd choice of words—I remember them. I told him you played a wily game of chess. And it’s true, you do. But it was a long time ago. Before all this happened.”

  I nodded. “He already knew a lot about me when he got his sister to phone at five-thirty in the morning to tell me she had a colt with his foot off.”

  “So that’s who he is? Mrs. Bracken’s brother?”

  “Yeah.” I drank brandy and said, “If you’re ever talking to Sir Thomas Ullaston, would you mind asking him—and don’t make a drama of it—if he told Archie Kirk or Davis Tatum about that morning in the Jockey Club?”

  Sir Thomas Ullaston had been Senior Steward at the time, and had conducted the proceedings which led to the removal of the head of the security section who had arranged for Chico and me to be thoroughly deterred from investigating anything ever again. As far as I was concerned it was all past history, and I most emphatically wanted it to remain so.

  Charles said he would ask Sir Thomas.

  “Ask him not to let The Pump get hold of it.”

  Charles contemplated that possibility with about as much horror as I did myself.

  The bell of the side door rang distantly, and Charles frowned at his watch.

  “Who can that be? It’s almost eight o‘clock.”

  We soon found out. An ultrafamiliar voice called “Daddy?” across the hall outside, and an ultrafamiliar figure appeared in the doorway. Jenny ... Charles’s younger daughter ... my sometime wife. My still em- . bittered wife, whose tongue had barbs.

  Smothering piercing dismay, I stood up, and Charles also.

  “Jenny,” Charles said, advancing to greet her. “What a lovely surprise.”

  She turned her cheek coolly, as always, and said, “We were passing. It seemed impossible not to call in.” She looked at me without much emotion and said, “We didn’t know you
were here until I saw your car outside.”

  I took the few steps between us and gave her the sort of cheek-to-cheek salutation she’d bestowed on Charles. She accepted the politeness, as always, as the civilized acknowledgment of adversaries after battle.

  “You look thin,” she observed, not with concern but with criticism, from habit.

  She, I thought, looked as beautiful as always, but there was nothing to be gained by saying so. I didn’t want her to sneer at me. To begin with, it ruined the sweet curve of her mouth. She could hurt me with words whenever she tried, and she’d tried often. My only defense had been—and still was—silence.

  Her handsome new husband had followed her into the room, shaking hands with Charles and apologizing for having appeared without warning.

  “My dear fellow, anytime,” Charles assured him.

  Anthony Wingham turned my way and with self-conscious affability said, “Sid...,” and held out his hand.

  It was extraordinary, I thought, enduring his hearty, embarrassed grasp, how often one regularly shook hands in the course of a day. I’d never really noticed it before.

  Charles poured drinks and suggested dinner. Anthony Wingham waffled a grateful refusal. Jenny gave me a cool look and sat in the gold brocade chair.

  Charles made small talk with Anthony until they’d exhausted the weather. I stood with them but looked at Jenny, and she at me. Into a sudden silence she said, “Well, Sid, I don’t suppose you want me to say it, but you’ve got yourself into a proper mess this time.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, I don’t want you to say it.”

  “Ellis Quint! Biting off more than you can chew. And back in the summer the papers pestered me, too. I suppose you know?”

  I unwillingly nodded.

  “That reporter from The Pump,” Jenny complained. “India Cathcart, I couldn’t get rid of her. She wanted to know all about you and about our divorce. Do you know what she wrote? She wrote that I’d told her that quite apart from being crippled, you weren’t man enough for me.”

  “I read it,” I said briefly.

  “Did you? And did you like it? Did you like that, Sid?”

  I didn’t reply. It was Charles who fiercely protested. “Jenny! Don’t.”

  Her face suddenly softened, all the spite dissolving and revealing the gentle girl I’d married. The transformation happened in a flash, like prison bars falling away. Her liberation, I thought, had dramatically come at last.

  “I didn’t say that,” she told me, as if bewildered. “I really didn’t. She made it up.”

  I swallowed. I found the reemergence of the old Jenny harder to handle than her scorn.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Well . . . I... I...”

  “Jenny,” Charles said again.

  “I told her,” Jenny said to him, “that I couldn’t live in Sid’s hard world. I told her that whatever she wrote she wouldn’t smash him or disintegrate him because no one had ever managed it. I told her that he never showed his feelings and that steel was putty compared to him, and that I couldn’t live with it.”

  Charles and I had heard her say much the same thing before. It was Anthony who looked surprised. He inspected my harmless-looking self from his superior height and obviously thought she had got me wrong.

  “India Cathcart didn’t believe Jenny, either,” I told him soothingly.

  “What?”

  “He reads minds, too,” Jenny said, putting down her glass and rising to her feet. “Anthony, darling, we’ll go now. OK?” To her father she said, “Sorry it’s such a short visit,” and to me, “India Cathcart is a bitch.”

  I kissed Jenny’s cheek.

  “I still love you,” I said.

  She looked briefly into my eyes. “I couldn’t live with it. I told her the truth.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t let her break you.”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said brightly, loudly, smiling, “when birds fly out of cages they sing and rejoice. So ... good-bye, Sid.”

  She looked happy. She laughed. I ached for the days when we’d met, when she looked like that always; but one could never go back.

  “Good-bye, Jenny,” I said.

  Charles, uncomprehending, went with them to see them off and came back frowning.

  “I simply don’t understand my daughter,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She tears you to pieces. I can’t stand it, even if you can. Why don’t you ever fight back?”

  “Look what I did to her.”

  “She knew what she was marrying.”

  “I don’t think she did. It isn’t always easy, being married to a jockey.”

  “You forgive her too much! And then, do you know what she said just now, when she was leaving? I don’t understand her. She gave me a hug—a hug—not a dutiful peck on the cheek, and she said, ‘Take care of Sid.’ ”

  I felt instantly liquefied inside: too close to tears.

  “Sid...”

  I shook my head, as much to retain composure as anything else.

  “We’ve made our peace,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Just now. The old Jenny came back. She’s free of me. She felt free quite suddenly ... so she’ll have no more need to ... to tear me to pieces, as you put it. I think that all that destructive anger has finally gone. Like she said, she’s flown out of the cage.”

  He said, “I do hope so,” but looked unconvinced. “I need a drink.”

  I smiled and joined him, but I discovered, as we later ate companionably together, that even though his daughter might no longer despise or torment me, what I perversely felt wasn’t relief, but loss.

  10

  Leaving Aynsford early, I drove back to London on Thursday morning and left the car, as 1 normally did, in a large public underground car park near Pont Square. From there I walked to the laundry where I usually took my shirts and waited while they fed my strip of rag from Northampton twice through the dry-cleaning cycle.

  What emerged was a stringy-looking object, basically light turquoise in color, with a non-geometric pattern on it of green, brown and salmon pink. There were also black irregular stains that had stayed obstinately in place.

  I persuaded the cleaners to iron it, with the only result that I had a flat strip instead of a wrinkled one.

  “What if I wash it with detergent and water?” I asked the burly, half-interested dry cleaner.

  “You couldn’t exactly harm it,” he said sarcastically.

  So I washed it and ironed it and ended as before: turquoise strip, wandering indeterminate pattern, stubborn black stain.

  With the help of the Yellow Pages I visited the wholesale showrooms of a well-known fabric designer. An infinitely polite old man there explained that my fabric pattern was woven, while theirs—the wholesaler‘s—was printed. Different market, he said. The wholesaler aimed at the upper end of the middle-class market. I, he said, needed to consult an interior decorator, and with kindness he wrote for me a short list of firms.

  The first two saw no profit in answering questions. At the third address I happened on an underworked twenty-year-old who ran pale long fingers through clean shoulder-length curls while he looked with interest at my offering. He pulled out a turquoise thread and held it up to the light.

  “This is silk,” he said.

  “Real silk?”

  “No possible doubt. This was expensive fabric. The pattern is woven in. See.” He turned the piece over to show me the back. “This is remarkable. Where did you get it? It looks like a very old lampas. Beautiful. The colors are organic, not mineral.”

  I looked at his obvious youth and asked if he could perhaps seek a second opinion.

  “Because I’m straight out of design school?” he guessed without umbrage. “But I studied fabrics. That’s why they took me on here. I know them. The designers don’t weave them, they use them.”

/>   “Then tell me what I’ve got.”

  He fingered the turquoise strip and held it to his lips and his cheek and seemed to commune with it as if it were a crystal ball.

  “It’s a modern copy,” he said. “It’s very skillfully done. It is lampas, woven on a Jacquard loom. There isn’t enough of it to be sure, but I think it’s a copy of a silk hanging made by Philippe de Lasalle in about 1760. But the original hadn’t a blue-green background, it was cream with this design of ropes and leaves in greens and red and gold.”

  I was impressed. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve just spent three years learning this sort of thing.”

  “Well ... who makes it now? Do I have to go to France?”

  “You could try one or two English firms but you know what—”

  He was brusquely interrupted by a severe-looking woman in a black dress and huge Aztec-type necklace who swept in and came to rest by the counter on which lay the unprepossessing rag.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “I asked you to catalog the new shipment of passementerie.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lane.”

  “Then please get on with it. Run along now.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lane.”

  “Do you want help?” she asked me briskly.

  “Only the names of some weavers.”

  On his way to the passementerie my source of knowledge spoke briefly over his shoulder. “It looks like a solitary weaver, not a firm. Try Saul Marcus.”

  “Where?” I called.

  “London.”

  “Thanks.”

  He went out of sight. Under Mrs. Lane’s inhospitable gaze I picked up my rag, smiled placatingly and departed.

  I found Saul Marcus first in the telephone directory and then in white-bearded person in an airy artist’s studio near Chiswick, West London, where he created fabric patterns.

  He looked with interest at my rag but shook his head.

  I urged him to search the far universe.

  “It might be Patricia Huxford’s work,” he said at length, dubiously. “You could try her. She does—or did—work like this sometimes. I don’t know of anyone else.”

  “Where would I find her?”