The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  The blue cracked bathroom, the bed on the floor, the caked ink bottle, the neglected garden, and the neat rows of books – I try to gather them together in my mind whenever I am enraged by the thought that Elise and the poet were killed outright. The angels of the Resurrection will invoke the dead man and the dead woman, but who will care to restore the fallen house of the famous poet if not myself? Who else will tell its story?

  When I reflect how Elise and the poet were taken in – how they calmly allowed a well-meaning soldier to sell them the notion of a funeral, I remind myself that one day I will accept, and so will you, an abstract funeral, and make no complaints.

  * * *

  JOHN FOWLES

  * * *

  THE ENIGMA

  Who can become muddy and yet, settling, slowly become limpid?

  Tao Te Ching

  The commonest kind of missing person is the adolescent girl, closely followed by the teenage boy. The majority in this category come from working-class homes and almost invariably from those where there is serious parental disturbance. There is another minor peak in the third decade of life, less markedly working class, and constituted by husbands and wives trying to run out on marriages or domestic situations they have got bored with. The figures dwindle sharply after the age of forty; older cases of genuine and lasting disappearance are extremely rare, and again are confined to the very poor – and even there to those, near vagabond, without close family.

  When John Marcus Fielding disappeared, he therefore contravened all social and statistical probability. Fifty-seven years old, rich, happily married, with a son and two daughters; on the board of several City companies (and very much not merely to adorn the letter-headings); owner of one of the finest Elizabethan manor-houses in East Anglia, with an active interest in the running of his adjoining 1,800-acre farm; a joint – if somewhat honorary – master of foxhounds, a keen shot… he was a man who, if there were an – arium of living human stereotypes, would have done very well as a model of his kind: the successful City man who is also a country land-owner and (in all but name) village squire. It would have been very understandable if he had felt that one or the other side of his life had become too time-consuming… but the most profoundly anomalous aspect of his case was that he was also a Conservative Member of Parliament.

  At 2.30 on the afternoon of Friday, July 13th, 1973, his elderly secretary, a Miss Parsons, watched him get into a taxi outside his London flat in Knightsbridge. He had a board meeting in the City; from there he was going to catch a train, the 5.22, to the market-town headquarters of his constituency. He would arrive soon after half-past six, then give a ‘surgery’ for two hours or so. His agent, who was invited to supper, would then drive him the twelve miles or so home to Tetbury Hall. A strong believer in the voting value of the personal contact, Fielding gave such surgeries twice a month. The agenda of that ominously appropriate day and date was perfectly normal.

  It was discovered subsequently that he had never appeared at the board meeting. His flat had been telephoned, but Miss Parsons had asked for, and been granted, the rest of the afternoon off – she was weekending with relatives down in Hastings. The daily help had also gone home. Usually exemplary in attendance or at least in notifying unavoidable absence, Fielding was forgiven his lapse, and the board went to business without him. The first realization that something was wrong was therefore the lot of the constituency agent. His member was not on the train he had gone to meet. He went back to the party offices to ring Fielding’s flat – and next, getting no answer there, his country home. At Tetbury Hall Mrs Fielding was unable to help. She had last spoken to her husband on the Thursday morning, so far as she knew he should be where he wasn’t. She thought it possible, however, that he might have decided to drive down with their son, a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. This son, Peter, had talked earlier in the week of coming down to Tetbury with his girlfriend. Perhaps he had spoken to his father in London more recently than she. The agent agreed to telephone Mrs Fielding again in half an hour’s time, if the member had still not arrived by then.

  She, of course, also tried the London flat; then failing there, Miss Parsons at home. But the secretary was already in Hastings. Mrs Fielding next attempted the flat in Islington that her son shared with two other L SE friends. The young man who answered had no idea where Peter was, but he ‘thought’ he was staying in town that weekend. The wife made one last effort – she tried the number of Peter’s girlfriend, who lived in Hampstead. But here again there was no answer. The lady at this stage was not unduly perturbed. It seemed most likely that her husband had simply missed his train and was catching the next one – and for some reason had failed, or been unable, to let anyone know of this delay. She waited for the agent, Drummond, to call back.

  He too had presumed a missed train or an overslept station, and had sent someone to await the arrival of the next trains in either direction. Yet when he rang back, as promised, it was to say that his deputy had had no luck. Mrs Fielding began to feel a definite puzzlement and some alarm; but Marcus always had work with him, plentiful means of identification, even if he had been taken ill or injured beyond speech. Besides, he was in good health, a fit man for his age – no heart trouble, nothing like that. What very tenuous fears Mrs Fielding had at this point were rather more those of a woman no longer quite so attractive as she had been. She was precisely the sort of wife who had been most shaken by the Lambton–Jellicoe scandal of earlier that year. Yet even in this area she had no grounds for suspicion at all. Her husband’s private disgust at the scandal had seemed perfectly genuine… and consonant with his general contempt for the wilder shores of the permissive society.

  An hour later Fielding had still appeared neither at the party offices nor Tetbury Hall. The faithful had been sent away, with apologies, little knowing that in three days’ time the cause of their disappointment was to be the subject of headlines. Drummond agreed to wait on at his desk; the supper, informal in any case, with no other guests invited, was forgotten. They would ring each other if and as soon as they had news; if not, then at nine. It was now that Mrs Fielding felt panic. It centred on the flat. She had the exchange check the line. It was in order. She telephoned various London friends, on the forlorn chance that in some fit of absentmindedness – but he was not that sort of person – Marcus had accepted a dinner or theatre engagement with them. These inquiries also drew a blank; in most cases, a polite explanation from staff that the persons wanted were abroad or themselves in the country. She made another attempt to reach her son; but now even the young man who had answered her previous call had disappeared. Peter’s girlfriend and Miss Parsons were similarly still not to be reached. Mrs Fielding’s anxiety and feeling of helplessness mounted, but she was essentially a practical and efficient woman. She rang back one of the closer London friends – close also in living only two or three minutes from the Knightsbridge flat – and asked him to go there and have the block porter open it up for him. She then called the porter to give her authority for this and to find out if perhaps the man had seen her husband. But he could tell her only that Mr Fielding had not passed his desk since he came on duty at six.

  Some ten minutes later the friend telephoned from the flat. There was no sign of Marcus, but everything seemed perfectly as it should be. He found and looked in the engagements diary on Miss Parsons’s desk, and read out the day’s programme. The morning had been barred out, it seemed; but there was nothing abnormal in that. It was the MP’s habit to keep Friday morning free for answering his less pressing correspondence. Fortunately Mrs Fielding knew a fellow director of the company whose board meeting was down for three o’clock. Her next move was to try him; and it was only then that she learnt the mystery had started before the failure to catch the 5.22 train; and that Miss Parsons had also (sinisterly as it seemed, since Mrs Fielding knew nothing of the innocent trip to Hastings) disappeared from the flat by three o’clock that afternoon. She now realized, of course, that whatev
er had happened might date back to the previous day. Marcus had been at the flat at nine on the Thursday morning, when she had spoken to him herself; but everything since then was uncertain. Very clearly something had gone seriously wrong.

  Drummond agreed to drive over to the Hall, so that some plan of action could be concerted. Meanwhile, Mrs Fielding spoke to the local police. She explained that it was merely a precaution… but if they could check the London hospitals and the accident register. Soon after Drummond arrived, the message came that there had been no casualties or cases of stroke in the last twenty-four hours that had not been identified. The lady and Drummond began to discuss other possibilities: a political kidnapping or something of the sort. But Fielding had mildly pro-Arab rather than pro-Israeli views. With so many other more ‘deserving’ cases in the House, he could hardly have been a target for the Black September movement or its like; nor could he – for all his belief in law and order and a strong policy in Ulster – have figured very high on any IRA list. Virtually all his infrequent Commons speeches were to do with finance or agriculture.

  Drummond pointed out that in any case such kidnappers would hardly have kept silent so long. An apolitical kidnapping was no more plausible – there were far richer men about… and surely one of the two Fielding daughters, Caroline and Francesca, both abroad at the time, would have been more likely victims if mere ransom money was the aim. And again, they would have had a demand by now. The more they discussed the matter the more it seemed that some kind of temporary amnesia was the most likely explanation. Yet surely even amnesiacs were aware that they had forgotten who they were and where they lived? The local doctor was called in from in front of his television set and gave an off-the-cuff opinion over the line. Had Mr Fielding shown forgetfulness recently? Worry, tenseness? Bad temper, anxiety? All had to be answered in the negative. Then any sudden shock? No, nothing. Amnesia was declared unlikely. The doctor gently suggested what had already been done regarding hospital admissions.

  By now Mrs Fielding had started once more to suspect some purely private scandal was looming over the tranquil horizon of her life. Just as she had earlier imagined an unconscious body lying in the London flat, she now saw a dinner for two in Paris. She could not seriously see the prim Miss Parsons’s as the female face in the candlelight; but she had that summer spent less time in London than usual. At any moment the telephone would ring and Marcus would be there, breaking some long-harboured truth about their marriage… though it had always seemed like the others one knew, indeed rather better than most in their circle. One had to suppose something very clandestine, right out of their class and normal world – some Cockney dolly-bird, heaven knows who. Somewhere inside herself and the privacies of her life, Mrs Fielding decided that she did not want any more inquiries made that night. Like all good Conservatives, she distinguished very sharply between private immorality and public scandal. What one did was never quite so reprehensible as letting it be generally known.

  As if to confirm her decision, the local police inspector now rang to ask if he could help in any other way. She tried to sound light and unworried, she was very probably making a mountain out of a molehill, she managed the man, she was desperately anxious not to have the press involved. She finally took the same tack with Drummond. There might be some natural explanation, a lost telegram, a call Miss Parsons had forgotten to make, they should at least wait till the morning. By then Peter could also have gone to the flat and searched more thoroughly.

  The Filipino houseboy showed Drummond out just after eleven. The agent had already drawn his own conclusions. He too suspected some scandal, and was secretly shocked – not only politically. Mrs Fielding seemed to him still an attractive woman, besides being a first-class member’s wife.

  The errant Peter finally telephoned just after midnight. At first he could hardly believe his mother. It now emerged that his girlfriend Isobel and he had had dinner with his father only the evening before, the Thursday. He had seemed absolutely normal then; had quite definitely not mentioned any change of weekend plan. Peter soon appreciated his mother’s worry, however, and agreed to go round to the Knightsbridge flat at once and to sleep there. It had occurred to Mrs Fielding that if her husband had been kidnapped, the kidnappers might know only that address; and might have spent their evening, like her, ringing the number in vain.

  But when Peter telephoned again – it was by then a quarter to one – he could only confirm what the last visitor had said. Everything seemed normal. The in-tray on Miss Parsons’s desk revealed nothing. There was no sign in his father’s bedroom of a hurried packing for a journey, and the suitcases and valises had the complement his mother detailed. There was nothing on any memo pad about a call to the agent or to Mrs Fielding. In the diary sat the usual list of appointments for the following week, starting with another board meeting and lunch for midday on the Monday. There remained the question of his passport. But that was normally kept in a filing-cabinet in the office, which was locked – Fielding himself and Miss Parsons having the only keys.

  Mother and son once more discussed the question of alerting the London police. It was finally decided to wait until morning, when perhaps the secondary enigma of Miss Parsons could be solved. Mrs Fielding slept poorly. When she woke for the fifth or sixth time, just after six on the Saturday, she decided to drive to London. She arrived there before nine, and spent half an hour with Peter going once more through the flat for any clue. None of her husband’s clothes seemed to be missing, there was no evidence at all of a sudden departure or journey. She tried Miss Parsons’s home number in Putney one last time. Nobody answered. It was enough.

  Mrs Fielding then made two preliminary calls. Just before ten she was speaking to the Home Secretary in person at his private house. There were obviously more than mere criminal considerations at stake, and she felt publicity was highly undesirable until at least a first thorough investigation had been made by the police.

  A few minutes later the hunt was at last placed firmly in professional hands.

  By Saturday evening they had clarified the picture, even if it was still that of a mystery. Miss Parsons had soon been traced, with a neighbour’s help, to her relatives in Hastings. She was profoundly shocked – she had been with the Fieldings for nearly twenty years – and completely at a loss. As he had gone out the day before, she remembered Mr Fielding had asked if some papers he needed for the board meeting were in his briefcase. She was positive that he had meant to go straight to the address in Cheapside where the meeting was to be held.

  The day porter told the police he hadn’t heard the address given the taxi-driver, but the gentleman had seemed quite normal – merely ‘in a bit of a hurry’. Miss Parsons came straight back to London, and opened up the filing cabinet. The passport was where it should be. She knew of no threatening letters or telephone calls; of no recent withdrawals of large sums of money, no travel arrangements. There had been nothing the least unusual in his behaviour all week. In private, out of Mrs Fielding’s hearing, she told the chief superintendent hastily moved in to handle the inquiry that the idea of another woman was ‘preposterous’. Mr Fielding was devoted to his wife and family. She had never heard or seen the slightest evidence of infidelity in her eighteen years as his confidential secretary.

  Fortunately the day porter had had a few words with the cab-driver before Fielding came down to take it. His description was good enough for the man to have been traced by mid-afternoon. He provided surprising proof that amnesia could hardly be the answer. He remembered the fare distinctly, and he was unshakeable. He had taken him to the British Museum, not Cheapside. Fielding hadn’t talked, he had read the whole way – either a newspaper or documents from the briefcase. The driver couldn’t remember whether he had actually walked into the Museum, since another immediate fare had distracted his attention as soon as Fielding paid him. But the Museum itself very soon provided evidence on that. The chief cloakroom attendant produced the briefcase at once – it had already been n
oted that it had not been retrieved when the Museum closed on the Friday. It was duly unlocked – and contained nothing but a copy of The Times, papers to do with the board meeting and some correspondence connected with the constituency surgery later that day.

  Mrs Fielding said her husband had some interest in art, and even collected sporting prints and paintings in an occasional way; but she knew of absolutely no reason whatever why he should go to the British Museum… even if he had been free of other engagements. To the best of her knowledge he had never been there once during the whole of her life with him. The cloakroom porter who had checked in the briefcase seemed the only attendant in the Museum – crowded with the usual July tourists – who had any recall at all of the MP. He had perhaps merely walked through to the north entrance and caught another taxi. It suggested a little the behaviour of a man who knew he was being followed; and strongly that of one determined to give no clue as to his eventual destination.

  The police now felt that the matter could not be kept secret beyond the Sunday; and that it was better to release the facts officially in time for the Monday morning papers rather than have accounts based on wild rumours. Some kind of mental breakdown did seem the best hypothesis, after all; and a photograph vastly increased chances of recognition. Of course they checked far more than Mrs Fielding realized; the help of Security and the Special Branch was invoked. But Fielding had never held ministerial rank, there could be no question of official secrets, some espionage scandal. None of the companies with whom he was connected showed the least doubt as to his trustworthiness… a City scandal was also soon ruled out of court. There remained the possibility of something along the Lambton-Jellicoe lines: a man breaking under the threat of a blackmailing situation. But again there was nothing on him of that nature. His papers were thoroughly gone through; no mysterious addresses, no sinister letters appeared. He was given an equally clean bill by all those who had thought they knew him well privately. His bank accounts were examined – no unexplained withdrawals, even in several preceding months, let alone in the week before his disappearance. He had done a certain amount of share-dealing during the summer, but his stockbrokers could show that everything that had been sold had been simply to improve his portfolio. It had all been re-invested. Nor had he made any recent new dispositions regarding his family in his will; cast-iron provisions had been effected many years before.