Political Death

by Antonia Fraser

Jemima did not tell Archie that she had found one special letter, folded very small, inside one of the early Diaries. It must have been an early letter, perhaps the very first? After the first night together? After the first afternoon together? It was entirely covered with three words over and over again: “I love you I love you I love you I love you” and lastly “I love you forever.”

  Treasured for thirty years, this was the letter of a young and passionate man to the first woman in his life. What connection did he have with that sad ruined statesman Jemima had seen on Saturday night? She should not have read the letter. She looked around for a match. A Swan Vesta box stood by the fireplace, which still contained a gas fire, although with its elements much broken. There were two matches in the box. One would not strike. Jemima used the other to burn the letter.

  Nor did she tell Archie the single most affecting line in all the Diaries. It was quite short.

  “Today Burgo Smyth rang and asked me for lunch. Said he’d been plucking up the courage ever since that evening at the Barrowcloughs. Told him I’d think about it. He’s so dishy. I think I’ll go.”

  Over thirty years, Jemima had wanted to cry out to the woman writing laboriously and lovingly in her Asprey’s Diary with her fountain pen, “Don’t go.”

  Inspecting Archie’s slumped form, Jemima was suddenly reminded of the time. “What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “What does that mean?” Archie showed a trace of his old truculent manner.

  “Why aren’t you busy being counted in as a splendid new Tory legislator? That’s what I mean.”

  “Our declaration is not until tomorrow. It’s a big constituency, rural. That was the point. That was going to be my alibi. I worked it out. I’m not as stupid as everyone thinks I am, you know. It’s a quick journey, I do it all the time, I use the M25, then the back roads, clear at this time of night. My car is not exactly slow and I keep a look-out for the police, although the last time they stopped me it was no problem—actually I made record time—”

  “For God’s sake,” Jemima interrupted him impatiently, “spare me the macho boasting.”

  “Sarah didn’t know,” said Archie sullenly. “She got me to sign that fax. She did know the letters were here; Randall Birley arranged it. But she’d no idea what my plan was tonight. Please believe that. Sarah’s great on truth and justice and all that. Even if it ruins Dad.”

  He got up. “I’ve no intention of reading the letters. That sort of thing disgusts me. My father! I’ll take the Diaries too. And I’ll destroy them unread, I assure you. This time I really will destroy them. I don’t care who they belong to.”

  “It’s too late.” Jemima did not move. The pile of small blue Diaries lay at her feet, and one was on her lap. “I’ve read them.”

  “Well, you’ll bloody well have to keep your mouth shut, won’t you. Because you won’t have any proof.”

  “I mean: I’ve read them. And I know what happened, all those years ago. I can’t keep my mouth shut. You see I know who killed Franklyn Faber. And another death as well. You may not like what I’m going to say, Archie, but at least your father was not and is not a murderer. Not in the clear about everything, I’m afraid, not by some standards. As for your verdict, it rather depends what your personal standards are.”

  She thought of the crucial passage in Imogen Swain’s Diary: “Bur told me everything. He trusts me. He doesn’t trust anyone else. Not even Tee knows this. Well, she wouldn’t, would she? Just sits in the country. No support, ever. Bur told me all about F.F. and him at Oxford. I knew that before, knew that he and F.F. had a sort of affair, knew that F.F. was queer, but Bur wasn’t. He just lacked confidence, he said, that awful mother, etc., etc. But they did get involved. F.F. was madly in love with Bur, can’t blame him for that I suppose. He just likes beautiful young men. But now F.F. is being blackmailed, needs a lot of money, he says. So he’s been putting pressure on my poor darling Bur.

  “Bur has done something very silly. I don’t quite understand, except it was very silly, reckless, he says. Bur is reckless sometimes. He let F.F. have a document to sell, let him steal it, son of put it in his way. It was an arrangement between them. Nothing really wrong because Bur said the facts should have been known anyway. But he had to do it, otherwise F.F. might have said awful things about him and Bur at Oxford. Bur said—

  The Diary broke off. When it was resumed on another page, the handwriting was perceptibly larger and more frantic.

  “Bur just rang. He’s desperate. F.F. says he’s going to tell the truth. He won’t go to jail for Bur, he says. Why not? It’s all his fault. He says Bur has betrayed him and if he goes to prison, he’ll take Bur with him. Just because Bur had to think about his career. Of course he did. Bur is important. He’s a politician. F.F. is nothing, a nobody, journalists aren’t important.”

  There was another gap, then: “I’ve got to help Bur. I don’t care what I do. I’d kill for Bur. I will kill for him. Nothing in the world matters except my darling Bur.”

  There must have been a call. There must have been a call that lured Franklyn Faber to the appointment at Hippodrome Square. Perhaps the promise was a rendez-vous with Burgo Smyth in his mistress’s house. The word “rendezvous” had been used in Faber’s last note addressed to his flat-sharer John Barrymoor. Then there was the reference to Captain Oates, which had seemed to point to suicide (providentially from the point of view of Burgo and Imogen Swain): “As Captain Oates said in a very different kind of storm, I may be some time.” Now Jemima realised that it had merely been an indication of a potentially long (and tricky) visit.

  Jemima had continued reading. At one point she gave a slight gasp; otherwise she was quite still.

  At last she had put down the Diary. She had read the crucial entry. So that was it, the truth. The truth at last.

  Given that she now knew what happened when Franklyn Faber got to the house, it hardly mattered how he had been brought there. She wondered, briefly, how much of this Archie Smyth needed to know before deciding that there was no point in any further cover-up concerning Burgo.

  “Your father was a homosexual at Oxford,” she said. “Or at any rate he had a homosexual affair. With the journalist Franklyn Faber. Later when Faber was being blackmailed over his homosexual tastes (this was all pre-Wolfenden, don’t forget) and needed a great deal of money, he turned to his old friend to help him. Your father was a very junior minister. They concocted a plot. There was genuine public interest in a particular document relating to arms sales: both your father and Faber wanted it made public. But by letting Faber steal the document and sell it, they imagined they would kill two birds with one stone.

  “The theft duly happened and the sale. It was a set-up. The papers made a great to-do. What neither of them reckoned was that there would be a prosecution. But the money Faber had received was the problem. Nothing very high-minded about money! It looked like being fatal to his case. The judge gave a hostile summing-up. And at that point Faber panicked, threatened to betray your father if he didn’t come clean, explain what really happened.”

  “So then?” said Archie, “supposing all this is true?”

  “So then Franklyn Faber was brought to this house—nothing to do with your father—by Imogen Swain. And he was killed.”

  “She killed him! I knew it. That dreadful woman, that slag.”

  “I didn’t say that. I merely said that your father didn’t kill him. He was an accessory after the fact, in the legal phrase, but not before it. Look Archie, I’m going to make a call. Then I want you to let me take the Diaries away, to where they belong. You can drive me in your magnificent Porsche.” Jemima could not resist adding sardonically: “After all, I shan’t have any trouble with the police, shall I, not in your tender care?”

  The front of house of the Irving Theatre was still lit up when Archie Smyth deposited Jemima in front of the glass doors. The last of the audience was trickling out: the Benefit Performance of Twelfth Night, longer than usual, because of
Randall Birley’s spirited appeal from the stage at the end of the play.

  Archie said nothing as he drove away, just as he had been silent in the car all the way from Hippodrome Square to the West End. Jemima even wondered if he had taken in the import of what she said. A kinder explanation might be that he was totally shocked—and that was probably the true one. Jemima watched him roar away in his Porsche (he was not too shocked to do that) to what was no doubt a glorious future as a Tory MP, provided he didn’t get caught for speeding once too often. Not all policemen could be guaranteed to be indulgent of that kind of thing: rather the contrary. But for the time being, if the late polls were anything to go by, Archie was set for the kind of future his father had once had.

  Jemima picked up the airline bag and walked around the corner to the stage door. There was a considerable crowd of autograph hunters gathered, and the autograph they really wanted was that of Randall Birley. One woman, looking middle-aged, was clutching a large photograph of the star playing Romeo. Standing near her were two much younger girls in jeans and anoraks, giggling secretly. Jemima wanted to say to them, all three of them:

  “Do you really want to know what he’s like? I could tell you. I could tell you what he’s like when he makes love. And other things. You might not like all you heard. You might not like what’s going to happen now, inside a dressing-room at the Irving Theatre.”

  Instead, she passed on up the steps to the Stage Door. She knew exactly where she needed to go. Jemima had memorised the place from her previous visit, which she thought she could recall in every detail. But she was unprepared for the bark which came from the little room beside the Stage Door where someone was watching television. That man: Mike, if she remembered right. But “that man” confounded her expectations by greeting Jemima with a smile.

  “Jemima Shore, just seen you on telly, you gave him hell, I’ll say that for you. I was quite surprised.” Who or what? Some repeat. She looked over Mike’s shoulder and saw that by now, for better or for worse, the results of the election polls were being discussed by a panel.

  “What’s it look like? The election?” she asked urgently.

  “What does it ever look like?” The Stage Doorkeeper sounded particularly robust. “They’re going to win again, aren’t they? They always do. Bloody government. I can tell you something. I wouldn’t dream of voting for them. I wouldn’t dream of voting for anyone. You won’t catch me voting. Bloody government …”

  Jemima slid away. She did not need the man’s directions, and his political ramblings at this point were hard to take because they were almost certainly correct.

  There was no Hattie Vickers to guide Jemima this time. She had to make do with a large rough-and-ready poster in the corridor which included an informal photograph of Hattie, slightly turned away, laughing over her shoulder, a thick hank of hair curtaining her face. Tonight’s Benefit was announced. Donations, she noticed, were to be given towards a bursary at a drama school. Heated exchanges had not only preceded this decision but also followed it. In the course of them, Alice Martinez, favouring Save the Whale, and Kath Lowestoft, favouring Bosnian children, had fallen out so violently that their relationship as stage-mistress Olivia and stage-maid Maria had suffered considerably.

  Jemima, looking at the poster, imagined a small, pathetic, prattling ghost at her side. And that gave her courage.

  There was a noise of revelry in several of the dressing-rooms as Jemima passed through the square of corridors. The Benefit had brought in many admirers of Twelfth Night (or Randall Birley) who were not condemned to linger at the Stage Door. But there was no noise coming from the dressing-room she sought. She went directly to it and opened the door without knocking—she was after all expected.

  “Are you going to say something like ‘the game is up’?” asked Millie Swain.

  CHAPTER 18

  LOVE CONQUERS ALL

  Millie Swain looked at her. As she lounged, one long leg dangling over the chair, her expression was almost insolent.

  “You needn’t tell me about my mother’s Diary. I can tell you what it said without having read it. The Diary said I stabbed him. With her knife.

  “It was that ornamental knife, incredibly sharp, our father brought back from Malaya or Burma, some place like that. She kept it in her bedroom as a kind of protection. She once let me feel the blade, otherwise we just looked at it with awe.

  “ ‘That knife has killed people,’ Madre used to say. I was ten years old, I was big for my age, I was strong—and I suppose I struck lucky where I hit him. He fell and I think he must have struck his head on the marble mantelpiece. There was blood, lots of blood. Why did she have that knife there, on that table? To kill him, she told me. And why? I don’t understand.”

  “He was blackmailing Burgo about homosexuality at Oxford,” said Jemima. “I’ve read that too by now. Illegal of course. Dangerous stuff.”

  Millie pushed back the dark hair styled to be both boyish and sexy, which had made her—many thought—the perfect Viola.

  “Once Hattie reminded me, I remembered it, every single detail. Before that, there was only some kind of horror, a fear that was always with me. I came down from upstairs, our ghastly Nanny was asleep, snoring away, and I thought Olga was asleep too. I watched them, Madre so little, but not with Burgo. With another man. Faber, I suppose. She was crying and his arm was around her. I thought … I thought he was her lover, and that she was betraying Burgo. Isn’t it odd? I was madly, childishly in love with Burgo. So handsome, my Prince Charming. I used to imagine that I would marry him when I grew up. Madre would die and I would marry him.

  “So I saw this man, he put his arm round Madre for some reason. Arguing with her perhaps. And I ran in. I took the knife, her knife, and stabbed him … the rest you know. What happened to that knife, I wonder,” Millie added suddenly. “Did the Diary say?”

  “Your mother says she washed it and washed it before Burgo came. Then she buried it in the garden some time later.”

  “Where I suppose it still is. Ah, well.”

  “I don’t think Burgo had anything to do with that, just helped her with the body, which obviously he had to do. But she got the cellar blocked up, from outside that is, handled it all by herself. She was quite proud of all that, how she was managing,” said Jemima. “At that point she was so sure that it wasn’t forever, the separation, that it couldn’t possibly be forever.”

  “But it was.” There was a short silence. “Would you believe me, Jemima,” Millie went on, “if I told you that I remembered none of that? I repressed it all; I think that’s the phrase. Olga knew or guessed something had happened. I used to have nightmares … but it all got covered up under the general convenient blanket of ‘Millie’s lies’ …”

  “I believe you. You were only a child. But that’s not why I’m here, Millie, the other deaths—”

  “She—Madre—was going to blow everything right up in smoke. She was going to broadcast to the Press about Burgo. I couldn’t let there be a scandal,” said Millie sharply. “This was my big chance, wasn’t it? Not only on stage, of course, but with him, with Randall. I couldn’t lose him, as Madre lost Burgo. It simply wasn’t possible. He’s my whole life.”

  Jemima, recalling some of the phrases in Imogen’s Diary, thought: Like mother, like daughter. That seemed to be the lesson from this hideous tangle, not the cheery message of the curtain of Twelfth Night: Love Conquers All. Except that as it turned out, Imogen Swain had never been a murderer, which was more than you could say about Millie. Lady Imogen’s cover-up had possibly been as much to protect Millie as to protect her lover. At least one should give her the benefit of the doubt. And Burgo too had acted to protect the child as well as himself.

  “You’ve killed three times. In the name of love.” Jemima, who had intended to sound aloof at this point, realised that she sounded what she felt: angry.

  “Three times?”

  “Your mother?” In spite of Pompey’s pronouncement, she had to test i
t.

  Millie seemed genuinely astonished. Then she laughed; it was not a pretty sound. Her lovely musical stage voice had been abandoned for one more like the harshness of her sister Olga.

  “Oh, you think I killed Madre? My dear, I can assure you that was simply not necessary. Madre killed herself all right. A horrible scene it was. And yes, I was there when she did it. I went back after the theatre, I was furious with her. It was easy. I helped myself to the extra key in the bowl when Olga wasn’t looking and let Olga think she had the only key. I had to come back and confront her. Suddenly I couldn’t bear it any more, this dreadful pretence that she was a young woman, a beautiful woman with a lover. I was the young woman with the lover and she was wrecking everything I’d worked for.

  “We went first to the drawing-room and I tried to put away her photo, the bride. We struggled. So I grabbed that terrible false picture of her with both of us, the devoted mother we never had, and smashed it. Nothing she could do about that. Then we went to her bedroom. I picked up a mirror. After that, the nursery. I took her, I led her, quite gently. Firmly. And I said, ‘Madre, look it’s empty. There are no children here. And Madre,’ I said, ‘Burgo is not coming back for you. He’s never coming back for you. You’re not a Beaton Beauty any longer. You’re old, Madre, wrinkled, a horrible old lady. It’s over. If you don’t believe me, look, look in this mirror.’ I turned the mirror and showed her her face. She screamed. She ran to the balcony, it was very windy, but she managed to open the doors and she flung herself over. ‘Burgo.’ Her last word was ‘Burgo,’ Not ‘Millie.’ Not ‘Olga.’ ‘Burgo.’ ”

  “Do you think that makes you free of her death?”

  “Oh no, I’ll never be free of Madre, I know that now,” said Millie. The insolence had gone.

  “But Hattie, poor little Hattie.”

  “She was going to betray me. She told me. She read the Diaries. She shouldn’t have done that. She taunted me. She said there was something horrible in it about me. I pretended not to know what she was talking about. But that’s when it came back to me. In all its horror. And she said she would show them to Randall—she was in love with him, you see—and then he would be disgusted by me and our relationship would be over. And then he would turn to her. And after that, she deliberately let them be stolen, or stole them herself.”