The Last Best Friend

by George Sims

  ‘It’s funny. That aunt I told you about. When I was about the age of those kids I was dead set on having a fishing rod—Greenheart, quite a cheap one really. Yearned for it, but didn’t get it. So when I first earned some money I always used to carry a spare pound with me so that I could buy that damned rod if I wanted to. Yet now—if today someone was to offer me a free trip to fish the finest river in New Zealand it wouldn’t mean a thing.’

  The rain was coming fitfully to a stop as the large black cloud moved away, with a few last drops being shaken down as if someone was reluctant for the display to stop. Balfour realized that he was not altogether pleased that it was ending. The sun sparkled on the spray from the fountains and glistened on the giant equestrian statue by the Round Pond. Balfour pointed to it: ‘Everything’s had a wash and brush up except me.’

  Ruth got up and stood by his side with a teasing secretive smile. She was so close that her gardenia scent was heady.

  ‘Well—if you don’t want that old fishing rod what would you like?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ He put his left arm round her waist and looked straight into her eyes as he pondered this question, watching her closely to detect the subtlest response to his reply. ‘What do I want? First a wash. Then two or three inches of pure malt whisky, preferably Talisker’s…Then something to eat with plenty of red wine, and then…’ His left hand moulded her hip-bone and his fingers strayed over into the soft curve below.

  ‘What a brutish programme!’

  Balfour shrugged, ready to abandon the idea. ‘Well, that’s what I’d like.’

  Her pointed nails closed round his left wrist like a trap. ‘Where can you buy this Talisker stuff?’

  Chapter VI

  ‘Guilty!’ Balfour started up in a cold sweat from a vivid and humiliating dream. The verdict boomed and echoed in his ears. In the dream he had been searching through a large Victorian house which looked as though it had been shut up for years with sunlight coming through heavily dust-marked windows, and the stale-smelling rooms full of grimy furniture which had to be moved around laboriously for him even to advance a little way from the doors. The stuffiness was enervating and it seemed as if the supply of air was gradually being exhausted. When he had reached the top floor the search became more urgent, though he had still not understood its purpose. Opening a series of attic doors he found it was now twilight and the gloomy small rooms there were cold and damp. Then he heard a hurdy-gurdy grinding out a waltz and clambered up on a chair to one of the tiny awkward windows to look with difficulty down on a group of men, women, and children being shepherded along a narrow street: as he stared down Max Weber and Sam Weiss looked up and waved gaily, shouting some words he could not hear. From his vantage point he alone could see that at the end of the street a train composed of closed goods wagons waited for them. He had rushed down the stairs as the music changed to that of a military band with loudly clashing cymbals playing at an increasing tempo. In a panic, unable to think, he had charged with his shoulder at the locked front door to find that it opened into a small, crowded court-room with someone calling out in a dead-sounding voice ‘Wieviel stück?’ over and over again, despite the answering repetition ‘650 pieces in 12 goods wagons’. Then he was pushed through the crowd and confronted by a young girl with long blonde hair covering her face, obviously nude apart from a shabby overcoat much too large for her. He was aware without being told that he would be found innocent of his unknown crime if he did not touch her but with a feeling of fascination and horror he had embraced her, tugging the clumsy cloth away from her peerless bare shoulders, hearing at once the echoing verdict and the train slowly chugging out of the station.

  Balfour could feel the pricking sensation of tiny drops of sweat on his scalp. Once before he had experienced a similar nightmare, another unnerving elaboration of guilt, some days after he had been with Sam to see a haunting film about the war-time ghetto in Warsaw. He sprang out of bed and had a cold shower, feeling that the grime and cobwebs of the old house had to be literally scrubbed away.

  When he shaved he saw how vividly his scars stood out now that he was so deeply tanned. It was ironic that most war-time scars were a testimony to the victim’s efforts to end the Nazi horror, but his reminded him only of the futility of his five weeks in Italy—and that while trainloads of Jews were being butchered he had been playing football for Eastern Command, when old ladies and children were being marshalled with knouts and Alsatian dogs he had been grumbling about conditions at Catterick and Aldershot Barracks.

  He shaved quickly but much more efficiently than he had done the previous morning in Calvi, then put on a kettle to make some Nescafé Continental. The refrigerator was turned off and bare apart from one lemon in the egg-shelf, but he did not feel like going out for breakfast. He put some sultanas in a fruit plate and moistened them with lemon juice, and took his meagre meal into the spacious living-room, furnished with only two red leather armchairs and a couch.

  Some of Balfour’s friends had criticized his flat in Bury Street: the large white block was ‘clinical’, ‘cold-looking’, ‘impersonal’. This did not worry him and he had continued the effect by having all his rooms painted white, laying dark blue carpet throughout, and putting in the absolute minimum amount of furniture. Years of seeing other people’s possessions being dispersed at auction sales had left him with a strong feeling against making such an accumulation for himself. A worn edition of Sir Thomas Browne was the only book he kept; otherwise he read paperbacks, giving them away as soon as they were finished. A reproduction of Vermeer’s Head of a Girl was the sole wall decoration.

  Music was important in Balfour’s life, and a small collection of records in a stainless-steel rack was an exception to his prejudice against possessions. He sat on the slate-blue linen couch and listened to Billie Holiday singing ‘Loveless Love’ while he drank his coffee and ate the sultana substitute for muesli which was his usual breakfast. Afterwards he put on one of Sam Weiss’s favourite jazz discs, the Art Tatum-Ben Webster Quartet playing ‘Night and Day,’ and fetched some more coffee, a calendar and a sheet of paper from the kitchen. At the top of the blank page he wrote 8th July, the last day on which he had seen Sammy: at the bottom he put 1st August, the day that S. had died.

  He had good reason to remember the evening of the 8th July and knew that Sammy had been his normal positive and lively self then. They had first tracked down an old W. C. Fields film and then dined at Bloom’s in Whitechapel High Street on beetroot bortsch and stuffed kishka. Coming back to Bury Street, they had settled down to coffee and listening to Brahms and Beethoven. It was during the adagio of the F Major quartet that Sammy had said enigmatically, with a hint of accusation, ‘Beethoven’s thoughts on death’, giving a funny look as though Balfour should find this particularly salutary.

  When the record was finished Sammy had said with a sigh, ‘Yes, life is so short,’ and then launched into a lecture on Balfour’s behaviour, telling him bluntly that he should not have left Barbara: ‘The children matter most. You don’t like your life with her, well you must lump it. Put up with it. Forget what you want for a bit and think about Toby and Prudence.’

  There was no one else who would have dared to talk to Balfour like that and certainly no one to whom he would have listened. He had sat there silent with growing irritation. (How easy to pinpoint other people’s stupidities; how facile to suggest solutions for their problems: as simple and ineffective as saying abracadabra.) His obvious though silent hostility had finally provoked Sammy into saying bitter things about people who refused to grow up and face up to their responsibilities, then leaving in an awkward silence. Neither of them had made any effort to get in touch before Balfour had left for Corsica on the 15th July.

  He looked at the calendar again. How odd it was to think that in those three weeks Sammy had been caught up in events that led to his violent death. Samuel Jacob Weiss, ‘a Jew by birth, an infidel by temperament’,
born on the 2nd February, 1911, in a small house in Schiffamtgasse in the Leopoldstadt, the Viennese equivalent of London’s East End, imprisoned in Dachau in 1938, exiled in 1939, was dead. Lover of children and music, humanist, socialist, connoisseur of jewels, manuscripts and paintings—what meaning did his life have now that it was ended? His body was presumably in a hospital mortuary and soon would be finally disposed of at the Golders Green Crematorium—like Balfour, Weiss had no religious beliefs and only rarely, reluctantly, had attended the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood to please his elderly sister who had subsequently gone to live in Tel Aviv. Looking at the newspaper account of the ‘death-plunge victim’ Balfour said ‘Meschugge’ as it seemed a more apt comment than any English phrase. A Hebrew word which had survived in Yiddish, it meant ‘mad’ but carried the additional idea of an empty, melancholic, lunar folly.

  Balfour opened a window wide and looked out towards Pall Mall. A slight breeze moved the curtains and the morning air was unused, temptingly fresh. There had been more rain during the night and an electric milk van slid noiselessly over asphalt which was drying patchily with the damp showing in grotesque patterns. The sky was a watery blue and the sunlight feebly warm after the fierce glare he had been used to in Corsica. It was just the kind of day he liked for walking round London, and he was glad that he was not committed to sitting it out in Sotheby’s or Christie’s. He decided to call in at his office and then go round to Carlos Place for a talk with Max Weber.

  ***

  As Balfour turned the corner into Jermyn Street he nearly bumped into a girl with abundant lively red hair and eyes of the same rare light brown colour as Mrs Alec Connolly’s. The evening with Ruth had been an instructive one. It was not the first time that he had found an apparent indifference masked a physical attraction, but he had not known another woman so frank about her desires and forthright in her language. At one crucial point her bluntness had led first to giggling and then to mutual laughter which had nearly the opposite effect to that she intended. Even so, his pulse raced at the memory of her slim hands urgently caressing his shoulders and then her nails lightly digging into the back of his neck, holding him tight to her white full-breasted body. Her languorous sighs—the final deep, drugging kisses.

  Afterwards, when he had asked her why she had agreed to his programme for the evening, her answer had been typically direct and unflattering. She had told him there was a gelataria in Florence that sold particularly delicious ices and was cunningly named ‘Perchè no’.

  ‘Why not?’—he had met his match in Mrs Alec Connolly. It was the same ‘living for pleasure’ attitude, a desire to gratify random impulses, which Sam Weiss had attacked so bitterly. Balfour could find no defence for it himself, but then his feelings towards women led him into a labyrinth of motives and desires which he could not disentangle.

  Balfour’s office in Jermyn Street was near London’s finest cheese shop. On the third floor and with only a very small brass plate ‘T. EDWARD BALFOUR. MANUSCRIPTS & AUTOGRAPH LETTERS’, by the front door, it did not attract any ‘passing trade’, but he wanted only callers who were seriously interested in his wares and would search him out. When he had first taken the office his assistant, Patricia Bowyer, had displayed a few framed facsimiles of famous letters in the hall but two of them, though worthless, had been stolen and he had scrapped the idea. Now there was nothing to tempt the passer-by to mount the stone steps. The hallway was painted an unattractive shade of brown which had been accurately described in a coarse phrase by ‘Chas.’ Squibb, but Balfour had not even attempted to persuade his landlord to change this.

  When he opened the door of the show-room his typist, Jane Lupton, was bent over a cleared desk moving pieces of an old parchment document about as though it was a jigsaw puzzle. She said hallo quietly, with a sad little smile of sympathy, and he just waved an acknowledgement before going through to a larger room which he shared with Miss Bowyer. Patricia Bowyer was typing but she pulled the paper from the machine on seeing him and balled it up. She seldom expressed her feelings and he was surprised to see her visibly disturbed. Squeezing the paper ball mechanically she said: ‘Oh dear. This was a letter to you. We were terribly sorry to hear about Mr Weiss. But you know how Jane and I liked him. Such a horrible shock!’

  There was a momentary quiver of her lips and Balfour was aware that she was precariously balanced on the edge of tears—the muscles of her throat moved in stiff little swallows. He had never seen her like this before and he felt at a loss for words. He remembered now that she and Sam had occasionally popped out for coffee together—they had a mutual, passionate interest in music.

  ‘Masses of notes here. I was just writing to you about some of them.’ Her voice was firmer, more in control. He moved near to her desk. There were two pages of quarto typing paper in front of her. One was covered with a large number of her usual neat notes. Those on the other page were nervously scrawled and appeared elliptical.

  Patricia waved him away from this page. ‘I shall have to translate this. Monday, 1st August, Detective Sergeant Lowther called in here.’ She peered doubtfully. ‘Four-thirty p.m. From D Division, Harrow Road Police Station, Paddington. Told me what had happened, and that…’ She faltered and again her voice became uncertain. ‘That Mr Weiss had a telegraph form in his pocket with a draft of a cable to you. Apparently he’d spoiled it. And he had one of our letterheads which I had given him with your Calvi address. I told him you would be away a week and that I would see you were informed…He said that someone from Mr Weiss’s shop had identified…Then yesterday a Detective Superintendent Hanson from Scotland Yard phoned. He said he was looking into this as “D Division is rather tied up just now”. Apparently he had been told at De Jong’s that you were Mr Weiss’s best friend and his executor. He said the body had been taken to the Westminster Mortuary, Horseferry Road, London, S.W.1., and was now under the jurisdiction of the coroner and could not be removed from there without the coroner’s permission. There would be a post mortem and probably an inquest. I told him you would be returning from Calvi at the end of this week and he asked that you contact him as soon as possible.’ She paused and looked through her notes again, then shook her head. ‘That’s all.’

  Balfour sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Thanks. I’m very sorry you’ve had to deal with this. Will you phone him this morning and say I can call round this afternoon or any time tomorrow? In a few minutes I want to pop out and see Mr Weber.’

  Patricia Bowyer nodded and put the other page of notes in his hand. ‘These are business—mostly straightforward. Perhaps I should amplify one. Miss Phelips phoned on 22nd July—said she had forgotten you were away. I thought—I may be wrong—that she sounded slightly put out…’

  ‘That’s odd.’ Balfour did not doubt that Patricia had judged Miss Phelips’ tone correctly—he had great faith in her perceptiveness and was always ready to take the warning implied in her rare sudden harsh laugh, which was her method of attacking someone’s probity.

  Miss Olivia Malise Phelips was far and away Balfour’s best customer. A woman of great wealth, she lived comparatively simply in the rambling Malise house in Roehampton, administering trusts and charities, reading omnivorously, growing roses and peaches. She collected poetical manuscripts with the intention that they should eventually go to the Bodleian Library, and it was on her behalf that Balfour made most of his flying visits to New York and Paris. In buying for her he was allowed to use his own discretion, and her account was paid invariably on the first of the month. But their relationship had long since ceased to be a purely commercial one. He looked forward keenly to visits to her house and to hearing her quiet, ironic comments on life. On two delightful occasions he had taken her in his car to see the ruins that remained of the Phelips’ mansion, Crabbe’s Park, near Malmesbury. Their tastes were very similar and the difference in their ages seemed unimportant when he was in her company—he always felt he was talking to a contemporary rat
her than a woman who had been born in 1890. In his time he had lost several customers due to his impatience and impulsiveness, and usually he preferred that Patricia Bowyer should deal with collectors while he concentrated on buying, but Miss Phelips was an exception to this rule and even a suggestion that she was annoyed was rather disturbing.

  ‘You did tell her you would be abroad?’ Patricia queried.

  ‘Of course. And I checked with her that there was nothing she wanted at the London sales while I was away.’

  ‘Perhaps she remembered that when I told her and didn’t like to admit it. She is getting on and does forget things sometimes.’

  ‘She might—she might,’ Balfour murmured doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, one final thing. Mr Garratt has moved again.’ Patricia’s voice was deliberately flat as if she was suppressing any comment. She picked up a big, deckle-edged card, looked at it for a moment then handed it to Balfour. Her tone became a little tart: ‘From the Quadrant Arcade to Dover Street. To Wigmore Street. To Crawford Street. And now to Lampeter Parade—it’s next to a greengrocer’s.’

  The card was set in a large italic type and decorated with an engraving of an eighteenth-century popinjay removing his hat and bowing. ‘Mr Howard St John Garratt begs leave to announce the removal of the Quadrant Galleries to larger premises in Lampeter Parade, W.C.2. Telephone number to be announced later.’ The printing was amateurish and uneven. Balfour stared at the card, pondering if there was indeed something about it, and the uncertain telephone status, which would raise doubts in a recipient’s mind of Garratt’s financial position, or if it was just his own hard-won knowledge. ‘Poor old Howard. This must have been sudden.’

  Patricia said, ‘A moonlight flit I should think.’