by Simon Brett
‘How had she been killed?’ I asked.
Queenie looked at me curiously, as if I were a slow-thinking child. ‘It wasn’t her who’d been killed. It was her cat.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s not the first case I’ve heard about locally. Young people. On drugs probably. You’d have to have a sick mind to torture a cat, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Still, there are a lot of people with sick minds around these days. Lots of people with mental health,’ said Queenie, with the complacency of someone who would never consider that her name might be included in that number.
I was struck, not for the first time, by how many people use the expression ‘mental health’ to mean the exact opposite.
While I was at Queenie’s, the mobile had blipped a couple of times with text messages. I checked them as soon as I got in the Yeti. There’s something inside me that means I have to respond to text messages as soon as I get them. Emails too, actually. It could be news of some crisis with one of my clients. Or the family.
The text was family, but not worrying family. My mother. Fleur Bonnier. Once an actress. Still an actress, she would probably argue. Or ‘actor’, more likely she’d say. She’s very obedient to her own code of political correctness. ‘One may not work so much these days, dahling,’ she would say to me, ‘but the instinct to act never dies.’ Something which, in her case, I have witnessed on many occasions. To call her a ‘drama queen’ doesn’t come near.
Still, I don’t worry about her much now. She’s in one of the more stable stages of her life. Married, for the third time, to Kenneth, a solicitor. So, for once, no money worries. And, to add even more to my mother’s satisfaction, he’s four years younger than she is.
She wasn’t even married to my father. He was an actor she’d worked with in A Streetcar Named Desire. Fleur assured me it had been an affair of passion – ‘All of my affairs have been affairs of passion, dahling.’ But I never met him. And when, in my early teens, she told me he had died, I felt absolutely nothing. She was by then married to her first husband, who was perfectly amiable to me, but with whom I felt no bond either. Despite the amount of psychological literature I have read on the subject, I’ve never been aware of missing a male parental presence in my life.
Fleur, typically, landed me with her surname. Bonnier. Ellen Bonnier. She insisted the name was of Huguenot origin. I never found any proof of that and was very glad to be shot of the name when I got married. So far as I can gather, in my early years, Fleur treated me like a rather daring accessory she had bought. A lot of her theatrical chums apparently described her as being ‘very brave’ to face life as a single mother. But pretty soon, when a new lover came on the scene, she lost interest in her new accessory.
Fleur’s text that morning read: ‘Going to the gym at Goodwood. Lunch there afterwards? Say oneish? X F’.
Goodwood is the local stately home, whose estate features a hotel and fitness spa. In the latter my mother spends an inordinate amount of time and money. Kenneth’s money, of course. The range of designer gym wear she owns fills a whole wardrobe. She usually fits in her session on the cycling machine or a swim late morning, so that she can stay for lunch. And lunch, for Fleur Bonnier, invariably includes wine.
When she was acting, she was professional enough not to drink until after the evening’s theatre show or the end of a day’s filming. Now she’s not acting, she shows no such restraint. And if I were to join her in the Goodwood restaurant, she would expect me to drink wine with her. I would restrict myself to one small glass – the loss of my licence would end my decluttering career – while Fleur would tank off round West Sussex with half a bottle inside her. Rather annoyingly, she’s never been stopped by the police. Her licence is innocent of penalty points (whereas I have got three from some mercy mission I had to do for Ben a couple of years back).
My mother does not take my work seriously. She treats it as if it were some kind of hobby, and her constant invitations for me to go and share boozy lunches with her are an expression of that belief. She knows I’m going to refuse the offer – lunch for me is either a sandwich bolted down in the car between appointments or a meal completely ignored – but she insists on making it. I no longer even reply to those texts.
The second one is from Hilary. One of my closest friends – or perhaps I should say one of my more recent close friends. Working in the same area where I was brought up, I’m still in touch with a lot of girls from school. ‘Girls’ we call ourselves – who are we fooling? Perhaps I should say ‘a lot of women I used to be at school with.’ But I’ve known Hilary for less than ten years.
I met her when I was doing the CBT course. I guess what drew us together was a mutual fascination with what makes people tick. That, and being more or less of an age, and both single at the time. Also, Hilary was one of the less flaky people on the course. Anything in the mental health area attracts its fair share of weirdos, people more concerned with treating their own problems than helping others. Hilary and I were at least serious about the subject.
In fact, so far as the academic side was concerned, she was a lot more serious than I was. I was looking for basic understanding of the therapeutic resources that might be required in my decluttering career. Hilary went to the next level, and indeed a few levels after that. She trained as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, and is now fully qualified. She specializes in working with offenders, spends a lot of time in and out of prisons. She is scarily high-powered.
We actually have another connection, too, in that I introduced her to her second husband. Nice guy called Philip Boredean, with whom I had a brief fling when he was a medical student and I was only just out of school. He’s now a cardiovascular surgeon, and the relationship with Hilary seems to work fine. No kids, but that doesn’t seem to worry either of them. I pride myself on my skills as a fixer, but that’s the only time I’ve ventured into matchmaking. And it wasn’t really deliberate on my part. I just introduced the two of them at a party, and they took it from there.
Hilary acknowledged my input by inviting me to be her bridesmaid. I said I would, so long as we changed the job description. I reckoned I was a bit gnarled by then to be called a ‘bridesmaid’. And I certainly wasn’t going to be a ‘maid of honour’. We settled on ‘bride’s best friend’.
Now I rarely see them together – they live mostly in London – but Hilary is often down south for work. They’ve got a weekend place, a former coastguard’s cottage at West Wittering. It’s been modernized and made-over to a very high spec. Though a nineteenth-century coastguard might have found the white-painted exterior familiar, he wouldn’t have recognized any of the gleaming steel and glass inside.
Philip and Hilary have a boat at the local yacht club, but it doesn’t get used much. He keeps talking about taking more time off, weekends of sailing to take his mind off the stresses of surgery, but such breaks rarely seem to happen. Philip’s one of those people for whom work has always had more appeal than leisure.
My friendship with Hilary has survived strongly, though. I’m different with her than I am with other friends. Most of the ones from school I join up with to have a laugh, knock back a few drinks, discuss our lives’ triumphs and disasters. Usually the latter. Men, children, boredom, frustration, the unwelcome transformations of age – somehow the problems don’t seem so bad when you’re surrounded by other people finding the funny side. You may go straight back to reality when you get home, but at least you’ve had a brief respite.
It’s not like that with Hilary. I’m not saying she has no sense of humour – she can be very relaxed and witty – but when we get together, we pretty soon get back to the question that exercises a burning fascination for both of us; what makes people tick?
Though we know each other very well, there are areas of each other’s lives that are private. For example, Hilary never talks about her childhood. When the subject first came up, I remember her announcing, ‘Oh no, Ellen. You don’
t want to intrude on private grief.’ The words were said in a jokey way, but I’m sure there was some truth in them.
As a result, her childhood was off-limits. That was fine with me. I didn’t particularly want to discuss mine. There were other areas of my life I didn’t want to talk about either, so we laid down unspoken ground rules. And kept to them. That’s one of the advantages of making new friends when you’re older. They haven’t witnessed your past life, so you can present them with whichever edited version you choose.
Hilary did once mention that she used to go on a lot of creative writing courses, but it was soon clear she didn’t want to talk about that either. A passing phase of her life, perhaps, an early ambition which had faded. Again, fine by me. We had plenty of other stuff to talk about. Silences between us were rare.
The text I got from her that morning read: ‘In Chichester today. Something I’d like to talk about. Any chance of a coffee at BC?’
‘BC’ is Buon Caffè, a one-off coffee shop, much nicer than any of the identikit chains. I use it often. That day I had to drive through the centre of town for my next appointment, so I immediately texted Hilary back. ‘Could do, so long as it’s soon, get tied up later in the day. Nine thirty?’
She pinged back the single word, ‘Perfect’.
Hilary is one of those women who’s suffered through her life from being beautiful. A problem I’ve never had, at least not on the scale she’s endured it. I’ve been beautiful enough to the men who have found me beautiful, but never stopped the traffic. Not so for Hilary. She’s trim-figured, blonde, and has blue eyes so big that they give the misleading impression she’s innocent. For this reason, people – and I suppose I really mean men – have a great problem in taking her seriously.
She tries to counter the danger by dressing in severe dark trousers and high-necked tops, but that seems to make things worse rather than better. She looks as though she’s wearing a uniform and, of course, a lot of men have always been turned on by uniforms.
That she could have those looks and also be highly intelligent is something a lot of male brains have difficulty accepting. As a result, Hilary is sometimes over-eager to assert her academic qualifications. Maybe that’s why she got them in the first place.
That’s not a criticism of her. It’s an observation.
She’s also remarkably unaware of the effect she has on men. Particularly young men. On more than one occasion, Hilary’s got into awkward situations with young men. When she’s been teaching, working with junior colleagues, she doesn’t notice how many of them fall head over heels in love with her. With some women, such lack of observation would be an affectation, a way of drawing more attention to herself. Not so Hilary. She is genuinely surprised by each new impassioned declaration.
I’m in Buon Caffè often enough for Giovanni, who runs the place, to know that I’ll order a flat white. After that momentary pause that affects all men while they take in her beauty, he asks Hilary what she wants. ‘Same, please,’ she says.
We do a perfunctory check on each other’s home life.
‘How’s Philip?’
‘Oh, as ever. More interested in carving up some other woman’s heart than in nurturing mine.’ It was said as a joke, but there was a kernel of truth in it. During our brief fling, Philip never left me in any doubt that his studies came first. That was what brought the relationship to a premature end, I suppose. At that age I was more demanding of men, or possibly, as I now recognize, less secure with them. If I had a boyfriend – and Philip was one of my first (after a few fumbling one-night stands) – I wanted his focus to be entirely on me.
But Hilary’s words didn’t worry me. I knew their marriage really worked. I don’t think the lack of children was a cause for regret. They’d never have fitted them into their high-achieving lives.
‘Philip’s actually going to be down at the cottage this weekend,’ she said. ‘At least he says he is. And he means it … until some medical emergency takes precedence. I was wondering, if you’re at a loose end Sunday evening, why not come over and have a drink? Some supper, if you like? Philip always loves to see you.’
‘Can I let you know on that? Not certain what Ben’s going to be up to that evening.’
‘Sure. We’re not talking about a dinner party here. Just a drink and fridge leftovers. Let me know.’
‘Will do.’
‘So, how are the offspring?’
I reported that all was well with Jools and Ben.
‘And your mother?’
Raised eyebrows are all I need by way of answer. Hilary knows Fleur Bonnier.
‘Anyway, what is it you want to talk about?’ I ask. With her I know it won’t be frivolous.
‘Client I’ve got …’ Hilary begins.
Both of us deal with people about whose lives confidentiality is essential, but we both benefit from discussion of the issues we face. So, like most professionals in our kind of world, we’ve developed work area ground rules. The first of these is: no names.
‘Someone from Gradewell?’
Hilary nods. I’m referring to a local open prison. She’s doing some research work on the behaviour patterns of lifers. These are convicts who do the last couple of years of their sentences in an open prison, in the hope that, unlike the maximum security places where they’ve served most of their time, the atmosphere there is more like the real world into which they will shortly be catapulted. If Hilary’s in Chichester, it almost definitely means she’s working on her Gradewell project.
‘Problem?’
‘Potential problem. One I’d value your advice on, anyway.’
‘Pick my brains,’ I say, with a magnanimous wide-handed gesture. ‘You’re welcome to anything you can find there.’
‘Right,’ says Hilary, gathering her thoughts for a moment. It’s a habit she has, and it results in her always speaking with great concision. ‘It’s one of my lifers.’
‘Thought it might be.’ I know that when she says ‘lifers’, she means ‘murderers’.
‘He served twelve years in Erlestoke …’
‘What category’s that?’ Prisons are graded from ‘A’, for the really dangerous prisoners, down to ‘D’ for the most relaxed regimes, like open prisons.
‘“B”,’ Hilary replied. ‘And he’s serving the last two in Gradewell. He’s going to be released in a couple of weeks.’
‘And?’
‘And the plan was that he was going to move back in with his mother on the Hargood Estate in Portsmouth. Do you know it?’
‘I know Portsmouth.’
‘Well, the Hargood Estate is the bit of Portsmouth that isn’t a “Historic Heritage Site”. I’m talking about social housing. Pretty squalid.’
‘And you’re worried that, in his old environment, he’ll get back in with bad company and …?’
‘It’s not that so much.’
‘Who did he kill, by the way?’
‘His live-in girlfriend.’ Hilary sighed. ‘The usual thing. It had been rocky between them for some time. Both alcoholics and users. Both with a terrible record of relationships. She had a son who was taken into care a long time before. Ongoing history of police being called out for “domestics”. Very well known to the cops in the Worthing area. Anyway, one day an argument between them gets out of hand. He hits the girlfriend over the head with a frying pan. No other suspects. He gets sent down for eighteen years, later reduced to fourteen.’
‘Good behaviour?’
‘That kind of thing, yes.’
‘And what’s he like?’
‘Like the others,’ says Hilary, with a note of resignation in her voice.
She doesn’t need to spell this out to me. We’ve discussed it often enough. Most of the lifers she works with are the saddest and least threatening men you could ever meet. Many are frankly terrified of leaving the rough comforts of prison and going out into a world that has changed for them beyond all recognition. I’m sure somewhere out there are the vengeful psychopaths so belov
ed of crime writers, but they’re probably not the kind to be given two years’ acclimatization in Gradewell before release. The really dangerous ones are kept locked away in their Category A prisons for as long as possible.
‘So, what’s the problem? Is his mother a bad influence?’
‘No, I don’t think she has an evil bone in her body. It’s just … well, the circumstances in which she lives.’
I began to see where this was going. ‘Are you saying she’s a hoarder?’
Hilary nodded glumly. ‘That’s it. The place should have been checked out before he moved in, but the Prison Service have got such a backlog of work, it didn’t happen. Then the flat got inspected last week.’
‘By his probation officer?’
‘“Offender manager” is the current term.’
‘Ah. It would be.’ I had long ago stopped trying to second-guess the changing language of officialdom.
‘Anyway, the offender manager was deeply unimpressed by what he saw. He says it isn’t suitable accommodation for N— for my client.’
‘If he didn’t go to his mother’s place, what would it mean …?’
‘Going to some dreadful hostel or halfway house or B & B. The kind of place where he definitely would be mixing with just the sort of people he ought to keep clear of. I’m sure he’d be back inside within six months.’
‘Though not for murder.’
‘Hopefully not for murder.’
‘Is the mother happy about the prospect of having her son back?’
‘Apparently. I think, apart from the hoarding, she’s also losing it a bit. Mind and body, I’m afraid. Not probably long for this life. But my client’s very keen that he should go to her place. He wants to make up for neglecting her all the time he’s been inside.’
‘Have you met her, Hilary?’
‘No.’
‘So, what’s the situation now?’
‘I’ve spoken to the offender manager, who is unfortunately so inundated with work that he can’t take any action in the short term. We’ve got a fortnight.’