Political Death

by Antonia Fraser

  People did of course recognise Jemima Shore and several talked to her as if they knew her (they didn’t) but she was used to that; the people who thought you were a friend from seeing you so often on the box. It was indeed her image as Jemima Shore Investigator which inspired people to turn to her for help. Even people like Sarah and Archie Smyth—and perhaps Millie Swain.

  In the interval, yet another would-be client for her help emerged. Jemima was sitting in a seat procured by Millie Swain (but paid for by Jemima at her insistence). A still, dark-haired woman sat beside her. Her face was vaguely familiar but Jemima did not get the feeling that she had seen her on television or in the Press. The woman on the other hand gave Jemima a nervous half-smile as though she had recognised her but did not intend to trespass on her privacy.

  It was noticeable that throughout the first half of the play (Randall Birley had divided it into two acts only), the woman neither laughed nor stirred. The intensity with which she watched the action made Jemima wonder whether her neighbour was perhaps a true and passionate lover of the theatre, rather than a foyer fan. The woman’s stillness gave way only as the curtain dropped. She exhaled her breath sharply, gave a rather perfunctory clap and then turned to Jemima Shore.

  Jemima, having adequately enjoyed herself, was still clapping politely. Actually, she rather disliked Twelfth Night for its cruel humiliation of Malvolio-in-love. However, like her dislike of jogging, she intended to keep this view to herself. What Jemima had really enjoyed, to be frank, was the sex appeal of Randall Birley—why wasn’t Orsino a bigger part? His Byronic appearance was even better on stage, she decided, than on television as Max de Winter.

  Then there was Millie Swain’s performance. Jemima was thankful to find that she genuinely admired it: no embarrassments in the dressing-room, no need for insincere cries of “Darling, you were wonderful!” or even the final insincerity of a prolonged “Oooh.” Actually, Millie Swain was probably the better actor of the pair; there was a purity about her performance, hinting at fire beneath, which moved Jemima. The trouble was that Randall Birley was a star.

  “Jemima Shore?” Her neighbour spoke rapidly; she had a remarkably low, even harsh, voice for a woman. “I’m Millie’s sister, Olga Carter-Fox. Listen, Millie told me you were coming. You’ve got to help us, Harry and me. Yes, I know you rang me. So I want to make an appointment. Could you come for a drink tomorrow? Harry will be there—Saturday, no politics.” She grimaced.

  Olga Carter-Fox handed her a card. In facsimile handwriting, it read: “Sorry you were out when I called. Olga.” Beneath the signature was printed (in small letters) “Olga Carter-Fox, wife of your Conservative candidate,” then (in big letters) the name Harry Carter-Fox and an address in Shepherd’s Bush.

  “Forgive the calling card, but it gives you the address. I push it through the letter box, sometimes without even ringing the bell. It shows that I care.” Olga said this, so far as Jemima could make out, without irony. She added, “What do you think of the production? Or rather, isn’t he gorgeous?”

  “Definitely,” said Jemima. “And so is your sister—a brilliant actress, I mean.”

  “Ah, Millie the actress. I wouldn’t know about that.” There was an undisguised bitterness in her voice. “I’m just a humble politician’s wife or an even humbler Mum, very square in Millie’s eyes. But I suppose I know something about her; I should do after so many years of being her younger sister.”

  Jemima realised that Olga Carter-Fox’s puzzling resemblance was to her sister, whose photographs Jemima had been studying. But Millie had an attractive vivid gypsy look; Olga looked merely dour, her olive skin sallow. Their voices too were similar, although nature or training had made Millie’s quite thrilling, a Lauren Bacall of a voice, whereas Olga’s was merely deep. She could have been mistaken for a man on the telephone (now was that a useful asset for an MP’s wife?).

  After the play finished, Olga showed signs of leaving fast, muttering something about her daughter and babysitters even as tumultuous shrieks of delight and cheers were greeting the cast, especially Randall Birley. At the last moment, she turned back to Jemima: it was the moment when Randall gave his ritual-but-romantic kiss to Millie; whether by design or not, Olga distracted Jemima from this appealing sight.

  “This is what I know about my sister,” Olga said, the timbre of her voice enabling her to be heard quite clearly despite the audience. “She has no interest in family values. Maybe all actresses are like that, although some of them do wonderful things for charity. Susan Hampshire, people like that. But with Millie—family, decent things mean nothing to her. Unlike me; I’d. do anything for my family.” Then, looking rather darkly witch-like, Olga Carter-Fox stalked out.

  Decent things mean nothing to her? Just because she didn’t believe in “family values”? Jemima looked at Millie Swain with a speculative eye when she arrived in her dressing-room. There was no one else there. Some flowers—not particularly fresh—and some cards decorated the room but it had a melancholy feel, like Millie Swain herself now that she was no longer the ardent love-stricken tomboyish Viola.

  Jemima shivered. To her there was something desolate as well as dingy about theatres when you went backstage: the face of the theatre behind the mask of paint was sagging and full of lines. You went from the splendidly gilded auditorium to shabby areas which looked as if they had received a rough renovation after housing the homeless. You got a glimpse of a rather squalid-looking shower, door open. It was as though whoever ran the theatre was determined to rub your nose in the fact that all the splendour you had seen on the stage, the glitter and the velvet, had been a sham—slapped-on olive green paint, uneven corridors without carpets, this was reality. There was no Happening here.

  Even the roar of football from a small television screen in the little cubicle by the Stage Door had a tacky sound. As for that Stage Door cubicle itself, with its rows of keys, it had a poky, claustrophobic look. The oldish man in charge, nursing a mug of something, who was not actually watching the ranting football on his television screen, did not add to the impression of luxury.

  “What do you want?” he asked abruptly, as though Jemima Shore might want a number of things, but he could not imagine approving of any of them. It appeared to be an unpleasant surprise that any stranger (Jemima’s programmes definitely did not feature among his viewing) should come to the Stage Door in the first place. He telephoned down to Millie Swain with the same surly air and seemed genuinely disappointed that she was expecting Jemima. Did he dislike all visitors (it had to be admitted that he made an efficient watchdog), or was it the crush of people, mainly women, demanding to see Randall Birley which got on his nerves? Jemima had noted a little crowd of autograph-hunters on the side street outside, quite apart from the “friends” demanding admittance.

  More agreeable but also more agitated was the young woman who guided her to Millie Swain’s dressing-room, talking all the time. She was short, not much more than five feet, and quite plump, at least she looked plump and heavy-bosomed, in her black T-shirt with its Twelfth Night logo (a pair of crossed legs in tights—Viola’s? or maybe Malvolio’s?). Her guide chatted compulsively as they spun around one corner then another, descended some stairs, trailed down further corridors which should have brought them back to their starting-point, and finally reached Millie Swain’s dressing-room.

  “I’m Hattie, Hattie Vickers. I’ll take you. Oh God, I’ve had such an awful day. Don’t mind Mike and his grumpiness by the way. We think it’s because he bet Randall the show wouldn’t last, saying he’s never wrong after a hundred years in his job, and now he looks like he’s losing his bet. Oh heavens, everything’s gone wrong today.

  “Actually Mike has quite a responsibility,” Hattie went on. “I do his job on Thursdays, no, not just fielding the fans but all the checking and locking up. My God, you should see the keys! I feel like Mrs. Danvers. In more ways than one. It’s quite spooky sometimes, seriously spooky.”

  “Phantom of the theatre?
Sir Henry Irving goes walkabout?”

  Hattie paused. They were, Jemima noticed, outside Randall Birley’s dressing-room: “Number One: Mr. Birley.” Jemima had to admit to a sneaking desire to barge in unannounced and congratulate the star … just for a minute. She was persuaded otherwise by the sound of a girl’s voice, confident and clear as a bell.

  “I always said you were a wonderful actor, Randall. Ages ago, when we were all staying with Desmond in Ireland and we did charades. You were this brilliant rat—”

  “Still is,” said another voice, equally confident, male. There was the noise of loud, distinctly upper-class laughter and the popping of a champagne cork.

  “Randall always has lots of visitors,” said Hattie. There was something wistful about the way she said it and the sense of inane or at least agitated chatter faded. Then Hattie gave a shake of her springy brown curls and returned to the subject in hand.

  “No, not Sir Henry Irving. Not that kind of ghost. I could live with that. I’m really into the paranormal. I find it really interesting, don’t you? I mean, you probably come across a lot of it in television.” Now what on earth did she mean by that? “It’s the feeling of humans in an empty theatre,” went on Hattie, “humans who shouldn’t be there—that’s what spooks me on Thursday nights. I sometimes think I’m seriously psychic. It’s getting to me now really. Perhaps it’s the awful day I’ve had. Something weird happened, there was a sort of burglary, I still can’t work it out. Could that be a ghost? A phantom burglar? That would be rather amusing—never mind. Here we are. Sorry for the trek.” Hattie knocked on the door, ushered in Jemima and scurried away.

  Jemima accepted a glass of wine from Millie Swain (no champagne, but why should there have been?). She complimented Millie sincerely on her performance and quite unexpectedly moved into discussing unrequited love via Viola’s undeclared passion for Orsino.

  “You took me back to a very painful time in my life,” Jemima found herself saying. “A married man, and the worst of it was that when he was with his wife, I had the impression that he was betraying me. Did Viola feel that about Orsino’s obsessive love for Olivia when he sent her off to do his wooing?”

  Millie Swain looked at her. “It all ended happily for Viola, didn’t it? That’s what matters.”

  Jemima did not tell Millie that the man concerned, Tom Amyas, had been an MP, like Burgo Smyth, that he had written to her on House of Commons paper, as Burgo Smyth had written to Imogen Swain. Nor did she think it necessary to tell her that these painful memories, including the mistress’s jealousy of the wife, had been stirred by Imogen Swain’s Diary and those references to “Tee.”

  The Diary! That single-volume still locked up in a file in her flat, the police in the shape of Pompey of the Yard still not contacted. It was now or never. Jemima took a deep breath.

  “Look, Millie, whatever you’re going to say about your mother—and I’m very sorry about her death, by the way—whatever you’re going to say, I must tell you something. I took away one Diary. Your mother gave it to me. She was insistent about it. Kept saying, ‘It’s yours.’ ” She saw a startled look on Millie’s face. How should she proceed? Jemima settled for the convenient word “confusion,” not knowing how often in the past, with dread, Millie and Olga had heard the word applied to their mother.

  “There was a good deal of confusion on the subject that night. At one point your mother seemed to think that someone had either fetched them already or was going to fetch them later. A visitor she somehow identified with Burgo Smyth but clearly wasn’t.” Even as she spoke, an image sprang into Jemima’s mind: Sarah Smyth and her compassionate politician’s face, the one that meant, “I do so much regret that I’m about to deceive you.”

  Could it have been Sarah Smyth, discreet emissary of her father, without the attention of the world upon her, whom Lady Imogen had expected? What was it Lady Imogen had said? “Someone’s going to come round tonight to see me but it won’t be Burgo.” Something like that. Jemima would certainly bet on Sarah rather than Archie being chosen for this task: in Jemima’s opinion, Archie Smyth was the kind of son sent to plague successful fathers. And if her hunch was right, Sarah Smyth must also have come around on some previous occasion. Imogen Swain had breathed something about that too. But the actual collection must have been planned for that fateful night; it had not taken place before because Jemima had seen the bulging plastic bag, with her own eyes.

  That led to the crucial question: where were all the letters and all the Diaries (save one) at the present time? Jemima decided to ask Millie Swain straight out before she had recovered from what was evidently—and understandably—a shock about the single missing Diary.

  “Naturally I’m quite prepared to hand it over as soon as possible, to join the others. When your mother gave it to me to take away, as a gift, she said I should take the lot, but I didn’t.” Jemima realised she had injected a righteous note here: she must make it more casual. “Where are they, by the way? Where are the rest of them?”

  Millie Swain continued to stare at her.

  “A good question,” she said finally, in a level voice from which the usual deep thrill was conspicuously missing. “The frank answer is that I haven’t the faintest idea. You could try asking Hattie, I suppose.” It was Jemima’s turn to stare back. Millie added: “Hattie, the ASM, the young woman with the great hair, she showed you in here. Look, have another glass of wine. Randall wants us to go and have a glass of champagne with him, by the way. He says he’s a terrific fan of yours, and then we might have supper in the Italian place opposite and talk. But first I’d better fill you in about Hattie.”

  “Hattie, she who had an awful day?”

  “She had an awful day!” Millie exclaimed. “I’m the one who’s had the awful day or rather evening.” Jemima’s wine was by now rather warm. She had a craven desire for Randall Birley’s champagne which she instinctively felt would be ice-cool. However … Hattie. What on earth had curly-haired Hattie to do with Imogen Swain’s letters?

  “Hattie’s really let me down,” said Millie angrily. “You see, we, Olga and I, we took the whole works—or rather we thought we took the whole works—away from Hippodrome Square. Naturally Olga didn’t want to take that ghastly bundle into her precious temple of a family home, high priest Holy Harry Carter-Fox. So I brought it back to the theatre. But I didn’t want it here in my dressing-room either. So I gave the bag to Hattie Vickers. She was still here at the time, even though it was quite late because it was her night for locking up. Not her usual night but old Mike at the door had flu, or a hangover from the weekend or whatever. In fact when I got there, Hattie was chatting up rather than locking up. She was chatting up Randall. Everyone knows she’s got a crush on Randall, not a secret.”

  “Not a crime either. Like a good many of us.”

  “Oh quite. And shortly you shall have that champagne. Fan shall meet fan. But first of all the story, or rather the Hattie version. Our Hattie had access to some kind of safe or secure locked cupboard somewhere in this rabbit warren backstage and she said she’d put the whole thing in that. By this time, I should say, I’d incarcerated everything in yet another bag, an airline travel bag I had here, Air India. Not very appropriate for poor Madre, she never went anywhere near India. Hattie said she’d lock everything away safely and what with the first night, that seemed the ideal solution. The one thing I didn’t do was read them myself. Couldn’t face it. I wonder if I will ever face it.”

  Millie gave a kind of groan. “That all seems ages ago now, doesn’t it? Madre still alive. We were so worried about her. I remember Randall making some joke: ‘Your ma’s love letters, anything red-hot there? Maybe they are worth a packet.’ It seemed like a joke at the time. He even said: ‘Come on, let’s read them.’ ”

  “And did he? Did he read them?” The whole conversation, with Imogen Swain dead, had a tasteless ring: the three of them in Randall Birley’s dressing-room late at night, joking about that poor woman’s long-gone love a
ffair. One had to remember, as Millie Swain had pointed out, that Millie had believed her mother to be alive at that point. And that it was late. And the tension of the last preview …

  Wait a moment, thought Jemima as her investigative mind took over. “How did Randall Birley know the packet contained your mother’s love letters? You told him? And Hattie, too, I suppose.”

  “No, of course he didn’t read them. And yes, I did tell him, lightheartedly if you like. As for Hattie, no, I didn’t tell her, though it’s possible she might have heard. Hattie is always hanging about, she’s like that. After all, I had to explain where I had been, why I’d come back. All of that. I didn’t mention the Diaries. Everything I said was light. But no, of course we didn’t read them. Hattie just took the bag away and locked it up. She always seemed so reliable.

  “Cut to this afternoon,” Millie went on. “I wanted it back, the whole caboodle. We had to decide what to do, Olga and I. The whole thing about the Hippodrome Square house had made it very complicated. Do you know that Madre actually left it to him, our noble Foreign Secretary, Burgo Smyth? Can you imagine? No more welcome to him than to us.”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” said Jemima carefully. She did not think it necessary—just yet—to mention her encounter with the Smyths outside Number Nine Hippodrome Square, at which Sarah Smyth had broken the news of the embarrassing legacy.

  “No doubt it will all be fixed with great discretion. One of the good things about the Establishment, you could say, if you’re on the receiving end. Burgo Smyth will resign his rights, waive the bequest or whatever it is you do. No big deal for him! He hardly needs it financially, and politically he doesn’t need it at all. As a matter of fact, Madre only left it to him quite recently, when she started to live in the past, as it were, so I suppose we could have fought it, unsound mind and all that. Thank God we didn’t have to. All this will be fixed, presumably when the election is over.” Millie Swain gave a rather sweet smile, a relief from the fierceness with which she had been speaking.