Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Maurice and Timothy. The words ‘Sorry, Ma’ seemed to implicate them both. The name board for Leningrad railway station could be said to implicate them both, Maurice through his connections with Leningrad, Timothy because it was just the sort of meaningless touch he’d use in one of his books.

  Who would be keen to implicate Timothy and Maurice? Nigel? Who had no suspicious fingers of evidence pointing at him? Nigel.

  A trolley was being wheeled into the ward. Squeak squeak.

  Forget the trolley, Kate. Think. Not easy when a woman has just died and a squeaky trolley reminds you that soon it will be your turn. I hope I’m not a vain woman, thought Kate, but there has been a lot of richness and a certain amount of dignity in my life and I really think I deserve a trolley that doesn’t squeak. Have you one last wish? Yes. Please oil my trolley.

  It was in that thought that Kate accepted fully for the first time that she was dying, not some time in the future, but soon, here in Ward 3C. She realised in a flash that, at her present rate of progress, she would be about 116 before she could speak and 142 before she could walk. Did she want to recover? Was death so frightening? Could it not be a peaceful thing? She’d spoken of this on her television programme. Surely she had the integrity and honesty to apply it to herself?

  This wasn’t getting the matter in hand sorted out and if she was going to die it was important to get it sorted out quickly.

  Where had she got to? Nigel. The lack of evidence implicating him. Something he had said, though, in this ward a few days ago. She hadn’t been listening particularly carefully. It had been impossible to listen carefully all the time.

  The trolley was being wheeled out again squeak squeak. Glenda’s dead body was on that trolley squeak squeak. Glenda’s cold body, soon to rot squeak squeak. Glenda could feel nothing. Douglas had his memories and his bœuf bourguignon. Was death so terrible squeak squeak?

  Nigel. Sitting there, talking to . . . to whom? Something about . . . about . . . it hovered, oh how tantalisingly it hovered just out of reach. A great wave of claustrophobia crashed through her paralysed body. Inside her, where she wasn’t paralysed, there was movement, there was a scream that started at her toes and spread through her whole body. It was as if a great wave was rolling in on to Rhossili beach but inside one of the rocks, it couldn’t break, it could never break, it stood petrified at the moment before breaking, for ever, because, if it broke, Kate would die. Nigel’s remark hovering, and her brain cloudy, and her insides rolling rolling rolling towards Rhossili beach, that precious vastness, gulls wailing, how that wailing had irritated her, what wouldn’t she give to hear the wailing of the herring gulls now? And then it passed, this dreadful moment, the tension eased, not because of anything she had thought, she was helpless in the grip of these hallucinations. Yes. Hallucinations. She was going on a trip. No LSD. No Ecstasy. Just old age. She was sailing over Rhossili beach. Whee-hee. So this is what it’s like to be a herring gull. No. A kittiwake. Much more elegant. Kate the Kittiwake. Kittikate. No, that sounded like a pet food. And with the thought of a tin of pet food the trip ended, reality returned, she was in bed in Ward 3C again, thoroughly exhausted, extremely uncomfortable, utterly frustrated. Nigel said . . . what?

  Oh heavens. She could sense the approach of Angela Critchley, en route for the lavvy. And then she heard her saying, ‘I don’t know why I have to go down the corridor to the lavvy. I’m sure I booked a room with facilities.’ And then, oh horror, she stopped at the bottom of Kate’s bed. Wait for it. ‘Oh,’ said Angela Critchley, in her talking-to-baby voice. ‘Oh, isn’t he cute? Oh, who’s a cutey-wutey duddly-diddums? You are! Yes, you are!’

  Forget Angela Critchley. Concentrate. Nigel said . . . what?

  It wasn’t an easy day for concentration on Ward 3C. Now things were happening to Glenda’s bed, and Glenda’s bedside table. There was the hissing of nozzles. Serious cleaning was in progress. Fumigation, even, possibly. Removal of all traces of dead Glenda. Now that is not a nice thing to listen to when you are soon to die in the same ward. Removal of all traces of dead Kate. No! Think of Nigel, saying . . . saying . . . you can do it . . . saying . . .

  ‘I compile crosswords to keep my mind fit.’

  Yes.

  Yes yes yes.

  No. No. Not Nigel. A man who compiled crosswords would undoubtedly be capable of a murder of this kind. Let it not be Nigel. Except . . . except I don’t want it to be Timothy either. And certainly not Maurice.

  He’d never told her about the crosswords. She’d have disapproved. It’s a perverted use of brain power when you should be attempting to solve the problems of the world if you’re that clever.

  Perverted to use it to kill Graham and to implicate your two brothers in that ingenious but childish way. ‘Poor old Parsifal was shown the door long ago.’ Parsifal. That still rang a bell. Idly, Kate tried to make anagrams out of Parsifal, trying to get into the mind of the crossword compiler. Pal. That left RSIFA. Royal Society for the Improvement of Farm Animals. Fairs. Pal fairs. Friend goes round amusements with classical results. Parsifal. Easy. Nigel. Glein? Gelin? Nelig. Elgin. Mixed-up man loses his marbles. Oh, this is child’s play. Nigel Rand. Rend Glain. Lend grain. She had to admit that at last she could see the attraction of these mind games. They would at least ease the pain of lying here in hospital, and they were a bit easier than trying to solve a murder.

  Angela Critchley paused at the bottom of the bed again, on her way back from the lavvy.

  ‘You recognise me, don’t you?’ she said in her baby voice. ‘Yes! You do! Oh, little diddums.’

  At last Angela Critchley moved on.

  Where was I? Lend grain. Could that be something to do with the Midwest farmers? Hard to see now. Nigel Rand lends grain. Nigel Rand lends grain to Leningrad. The shock went through her body like a wave of ice.

  Leningrad was an anagram of Nigel Rand! Oh, Nigel, Nigel, your arrogance has betrayed you. I always suspected that there was a degree of arrogance somewhere in that secretive persona of yours. But to sign your murder like that! Probably fairly safe, actually. Nobody knew you compiled crosswords. Real-life policemen didn’t go round trying to make anagrams out of the evidence. Where would you stop? ‘Sorry Ma’ was an anagram of ‘Marry so’, an extremely feeble anagram, admittedly, but was it a concealed criticism of her for marrying so often? You’ve been a sorry ma to marry so. Had Nigel harboured deep-seated resentment of her husbands? She wouldn’t have known if he had.

  Oh, Nigel, why did you murder Graham? Why why why? Oh, the sadness that Kate felt. She’d thought that she would feel a great sense of relief in discovering that two of her sons were innocent. It wasn’t so. Yes, there was relief over Timothy and Maurice, but the pain of the knowledge was more . . .

  She had no knowledge! The discovery of the anagram pointed at least as clearly to Nigel’s innocence as to his guilt. Timothy and Maurice knew about his crosswords. The subject had been broached here in the ward when all four of her children were together.

  ‘Sorry, Ma’ had seemed to implicate both Maurice and Timothy. The name board from Leningrad railway station seemed to implicate them both too. It could be assumed that the fact of there being an anagram at all implicated Nigel, and the fact that it was an anagram of his name implicated him even further. Maybe the station name board was meant to implicate Maurice and Nigel, and the second implication of Timothy came from the nature of the whole murder, which, she understood, was very like the murders in his books. For the significance of the list of double-glazing salesmen had just dawned on Kate. It signified a double framing. That was all. Each brother was framed twice, and each piece of evidence framed two brothers.

  But no. That didn’t work. You didn’t have double frames in double glazing. You had double panes.

  Her brain was whizzing now. Memories were crowding in. She could hear Maurice’s words as clearly as if they were being said at that very moment. ‘They’re technically inept. Most of his clues are just slightly wrong.’ So, the lis
t of double-glazing firms had been a piece of literary parody! Did that eliminate Timothy? Had he the self-knowledge to know that about his clues? She so wanted him to be eliminated, but she also hoped that he had had the self-knowledge, because if she was able to eliminate him, she would be a great step nearer to solving the murder, and she realised now that she just didn’t want to know, she never had wanted to know, which was one more reason why she had never tried to work things out before, and this deathbed conversion to detection had been a bad mistake.

  Poor Inspector Crouch, wading through all the double-glazing firms and Midwest farmers and attempting the impossible task of conducting inquiries in Leningrad. All the details of the murder were pure decoration. The answer was to be found much nearer home, and she was more convinced than ever that one of her sons was the murderer.

  She didn’t entirely blame Inspector Crouch. The poor man had been bombarded with evidence, too much evidence. Lying in her bed she had no evidence whatsoever and no means of finding any. This made her task very much easier.

  Too much evidence. Why was there too much evidence? Because the murderer had planted it.

  The nature of the murder was fantastic, absurd, convoluted, yet childish. Why?

  Kate felt that there could only be one answer. The murder hadn’t been fantastic or absurd or convoluted or childish.

  She felt extremely tired. All her thinking, which she had believed to be so brilliant, had got her precisely nowhere. She was no better than Inspector Crouch.

  There was no chance of her solving the murder and she didn’t think she wanted to. She wanted to sleep. And, after she’d slept, it would be rather enjoyable to linger a while in recollection of her third marriage to Walter. She deserved that much, she felt.

  18 Enid

  SHE HAD RECEIVED his letter only three days after the murder.

  My dear dear Kate,

  I’ve just seen the terrible news on the television. I’m so used to seeing Maurice reporting some sad disaster, hearing those solemn words, ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Dien Bien Phu,’ and I assumed that he was speaking from the scene of some ghastly outrage, and suddenly I realised he was standing outside your house, talking about the murder of your husband. I was absolutely shattered. Kate, I could never have wished that you would lose Graham in such a way.

  Kate admired his use of’in such a way’. It was more subtle than she would have expected of him.

  I would very much like to attend the funeral, and will unless you tell me that you don’t want me there. I won’t speak to you unless you want me to, and I certainly won’t come back to the house or anything like that. But I would like to feel that, by my mere presence, given the depth of my feelings for you, I will be able to give you some moral support at least.

  I should love to meet you again as soon as you feel that you want to, we could have a nice quiet dinner together.

  I’m in good health. You’ll no doubt be surprised to learn that I’ve sold the firm. My father died last year. I couldn’t do it before that. It would have upset him. But Maurice obviously has no desire to give up a glittering career and become an engineer, and there are very sticky times ahead for manufacturing in this country, so I decided to get out while the going is good. You may not believe this, but the pleasure went out of it for me when you left. I realised, without being sentimental, I hope, that while I could never share your romantic ideal of my workers, they were, on the whole, at least as good a set of people as my shareholders. ‘There’s progress,’ I can hear you saying, with that faint Welsh lilt!

  I have no regular partner/companion/lover, whatever you care to call it, so I have a lot of time on my hands. If I can spend any of that time being any kind of comfort to you, it would be a privilege.

  I still love you, Kate, but it’s a love that expects nothing in return. I worshipped you once. I felt inferior to you. What I did to you on the night of Maurice’s birth gave me an inalienable right to feel inferior to you. I never made love with another woman from that day until our second marriage, or rather, until we made love prior to our second wedding! I felt that if there was even a small chance of winning back your love I must pursue it. I like to feel that the strength I showed in those years freed me for ever from the need to feel inferior to you.

  After our second split I had no such feelings, hence Linda, who I’m glad to say has found another sugar-daddy.

  I think that my behaviour in pursuing you with a private detective was justified, but I wish I hadn’t done it. I also wish that I hadn’t taken quite such a serious view of what he found. You were extremely foolish and, if I may say so, naive, but not wicked. It was that damned puritan guilt of yours, which you couldn’t help, it being bred in you. (Luckily for me you took the guilt off with your clothes! Might a psychiatrist say that this was because you never saw any of your puritan relatives, your dear adored puritan relatives, naked? Such memories I have of your nakedness, my darling!) But I do hate puritanism. I might not hate it so much if puritans didn’t always home in on enjoyment, rather than the real villains of the piece – cruelty, meanness, falseness, selfishness, corruption etc. etc. ad infinitum!

  I could see afterwards that in your involvement with Red Ron, vague and sketchy though I realise it was, you were being unfaithful not to me but to my money. I shouldn’t have been quite so worried about my wallet being cuckolded. Different if it had been my prick. It was my two settees that should have felt wounded, not my two balls.

  Well, well, well! I set out to write a conventional letter of sympathy, and I’ve opened my heart. I sat down all decorous and now I have a hard-on. I made it a rule in business to hold over any really controversial letters until the next morning, to read them again and see if I still wanted to send them. But this is no business letter, and I know that if I hold it over I won’t send it, because it’s in such extraordinary bad taste under the circumstances, so I’m sending it straight away.

  With all my love,

  Walter

  They met in a pub called the Swan with Two Necks. Walter chose it. It turned out to be a rather run-down hostelry on the fringes of Soho. The stuffing was coming out of the leather seats, and there were cigarette burns on the table tops.

  Kate arrived five minutes late, so as not to be the first. She had chosen what to wear that evening very carefully. She always dressed with simple elegance, but the sixties were beginning to swing, dresses were being worn shorter and shorter, youthful fashions were bursting on to the scene and that raised problems if you were sixty-two and didn’t want to look old-fashioned. Kate’s solution was a stylish short black-and-white dress which she called ‘Mary Quant meets Norman Hartnell’ and which revealed enough of her legs to show Walter that time had barely touched them.

  And there he was, sitting at a large wooden table, in an open-necked check shirt, with no jacket, sipping a pint of Guinness, craggier than ever, hair a bit thinner and streaked with grey, looking five years older and fifteen years younger than on the day on which they parted.

  ‘I hope you haven’t been here long,’ she said.

  ‘I got here five minutes early, so you wouldn’t be the first,’ he said, leaping to his feet and smiling broadly; what a rip-roaring, delightful, unselfconscious smile it was, her heart did a handstand at the sight of it.

  They kissed, demurely.

  ‘You look very informal. I feel overdressed.’

  ‘You look wonderful. Pint of Guinness?’

  ‘Of course not. That’s what I drank with Ron.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You horrible man.’

  ‘Indubitably. Dry white wine?’

  ‘Please.’

  The wine was Hirondelle. Kate sipped it gravely.

  ‘M’m,’ she said. ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve missed your wit.’

  ‘Only my wit?’

  Kate felt that Walter almost said something rude, but didn’t quite dare.

  She found that she was telling him all ab
out Graham, and the discovery of his other wives. She told it without shame, without seeking sympathy.

  They had another drink and he talked about his decision to sell. ‘I’ve sold Copson Towers too,’ he said. ‘You’d never need to be Kate of the Two Settees again.’ He closed his eyes in brief dismay at the unspoken ‘if we tried again’, and Kate thought, Poor Walter, he thinks it’s much too early to say that, but I don’t mind a bit.

  ‘What happened to Red Ron Rafferty?’ she asked, on the basis that, since the subject would have to be discussed some time, it was best to get rid of it quickly.

  ‘Gave up on ambition. He’s got a pub in Cork.’

  ‘Good. Ambition didn’t suit him.’

  ‘I thought we’d go to a Chinese restaurant in Gerrard Street,’ he said. ‘Chosen at random. I want food we can enjoy without concentration. We’re the point of the evening, not the food.’

  ‘I didn’t think you liked Chinese food. What’s happened to the roast beef and two veg?’

  He smiled a little shyly, hesitated, almost didn’t say any more, then decided that he would.

  ‘Linda opened my eyes to a few things.’

  ‘Good Lord! I’m mortified.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That ghastly little bitch succeeding where I failed. She’s dragged you into the modern world.’

  He was angry, very angry.

  ‘Nobody liked Linda,’ he said. ‘She looked rough, she had a voice like a circular saw, and she committed the unpardonable sin of being almost twenty years younger than me. She loved me. We split up because I didn’t love her, not because she was after my money.’

  ‘You said yourself she’s found another sugar-daddy.’

  ‘She’s been hurt. She might go for the jugular next time. But that’s a term I’m allowed to use about her, and you aren’t. It ill behoves you to call her a ghastly little bitch, you who profess to hate snobbery so much.’

  Kate blushed. It was many, many years since she had blushed.