In At The Deep End

by Anabel Donald

  But at the moment the question to ask the sugar-bag of summer cotton was obvious. ‘Why didn’t you say he’d never visited you?’

  ‘You won’t repeat any of this up at the school? It won’t get back to the Major?’

  She saw the Major as a powerful figure, I could hear from the anxiety in her voice. I reassured her again and complimented her on the lemonade. It was very good.

  ‘You seem to be a nice girl,’ she said, squinting at me. Her sight was as bad as her hearing but she was managing both, and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her brain. ‘You’ll understand. I don’t tell lies, as a rule.’

  ‘So why did you, this time?’

  ‘I did it for Tim.’ As she spoke, she looked at a bookshelf in a corner of the kitchen, then, when my glance followed hers, sharply away. As far as I could see the shelf held cookery books and some fat brown A4 envelopes. Perhaps she hid her money there?

  ‘Who’s Tim?’

  ‘Tim Robertson. That French boy’s partner. Tim’s from the school as well. They’re supposed to do the community service programme in twos. But the French boy wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like doing anything he didn’t want to.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Tim said . . . He made Tim not tell anyone. Tim was frightened of him, I think. So Tim never told anyone up at the school that the other boy didn’t come with him. If they’d found out he’d have been in terrible trouble, because he’s supposed to be in charge of the community service. He’s the Officer Commanding, they call it. That’s the point. I did it for Tim. So he didn’t get in trouble. So when they asked me about the French boy, I just talked about Tim, He’s a really nice boy. Gets pushed around up at the school. The Major doesn’t like Tim because he doesn’t fit in up there, and he’s afraid of getting into trouble. And I didn’t want him to, because he’s been ever so kind to me. He’s a duck.’

  She was quite militant in defence of her Tim, who couldn’t wait to get hold of. The only thing better than an adolescent’s friend, for information, is an adolescent’s enemy.

  ‘How can I meet Tim?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He’s finished with me, for the moment. He’s got a new partner and they’re painting the house next to the Warden’s. Over in Primrose Grove. They might be there this weekend.’

  Tim Robertson: a name for my action list. I left Matilda Beck-ford standing at the door of her house, clinging to the handle for support. When I got into the car, I waved, and she waved back. I wondered how many people visited her in her bungalow, purpose-built for decline, with its neatly cut lawn and sweet-smelling roses. She was still managing by herself; she presumably had enough money. A better old age than many.

  Still, as I drove away, I felt a little guilty that I could. Then I pushed the sentimentality aside. I wasn’t going to do anything to help Matilda Beckford, so any ‘aah’ saying was just sentimentality. I hate cruelty in all its forms, and sentimentality is just cruelty with icing sugar.

  There were two messages waiting for me at the hotel desk.

  2.6.92 pm Please ring Major Elms at Rizington Abey

  Please ring Alan Rotherom

  I hadn’t underestimated the Accelerated Trainee, but I liked his version of Ellis. Perhaps I should alert the Sunday Sport to another sighting.

  I rang Alan first, in case he had something to say. He didn’t. He was wittering, about Ellis checking up, about me having to be careful, not doing anything to land him in it. I soothed him. Then I rang Major Ellis.

  This time the duty private put me straight through.‘Miss Tanner,’ said the Major, ‘I’m prepared to discuss your project. Join me for dinner in the Mess tonight.’

  I ignored the military flim-flam and refused the invitation. My evening was already committed to Polly’s mess. After some negotiation, in which the subtext was how important, busy, and tireless the Major was, we settled that I’d see him at 0700 hours the following day.

  Then I grabbed my tape recorder, notebook, Martin Kelly’s notebooks, and my toothbrush, and drove back to London.

  Chapter Ten

  It must have been a first. No one else, ever, could have watched a sixteen-minute videoed segment of Cassie preparing Les Patates à l’Ail for three and a half hours. She trilled on about the gastronomic delights of southwest France; I lay on the floor; Polly lay on the sofa and provided the voice-over.

  ‘She’s knock-kneed. Look at that skirt – if she bent over you could see right up her bony bum. She’s got a speech defect. She can’t even cook – look how she’s holding that knife. Stupid pretentious cow, if I had an accent like hers I’d stick to English. Why can’t she just say potatoes? Who gives a sod if the dialect word for pommes de terre is patates? Chances are she only found it out when the script rolled up on the monitor, anyhow. I wouldn’t touch those potatoes with a bargepole, not after she’s shaken her dandruff all over them. I thought cooking was supposed to be hygienic. Why don’t they make her tie back that verminous clump of hideous red hair?’

  Every third time through, I made myself a cup of coffee and Polly a weak gin. At midnight, as Cassie bade us a tooth-flashing Bon appétit! for the thirteenth time and Polly pointed out that Cassie’s gums were receding, I punched the stop button on the VCR. Polly blinked at the silence. ‘What do you think, Alex?’ she said.

  ‘I absolutely agree,’ I said. ‘She’s completely vile. I’m making scrambled eggs, known in Pyrennean dialect as oeufs for a pissed-off, beautiful lady. Want some?’

  ‘How can I eat, at a time like this? Stop nagging. Stop trying to look after me. It’s not a role that suits you.’

  I made her the eggs anyway, and she ate some of them. I didn’t understand exactly why she was so upset. She and Clive had never been serious. She’d told me she didn’t want to marry him, she didn’t want him to leave his wife, it was just an affair. She’d been planning to end it herself. Yet now she seemed completely shattered. It had hardly been more than twenty-four hours since she’d heard, and yet she looked older, sadder, reduced. Less beautiful, less capable, less Polly.

  It made me feel reduced, too. I’d always depended on her bubbling optimism, her insistence on seeing the best in everything, the challenge in the disaster, the potential in the ugly duckling.

  I wasn’t so selfish that I wouldn’t let her feel what she felt, but I didn’t have the key to it. The underlying misery must have been something else. Not just because I thought no sane woman would have accepted a cup of coffee from Clive. Sexual tastes are irrational. But I’d watched Polly’s sexual involvement ebbing. Once or twice, in the last two months, she’d preferred to stay in with me and a Chinese takeaway rather than scuttle over to his Pimlico flat for stolen hours of lust.

  So if it wasn’t the sex, what was it?

  ‘What am I going to do, Alex?’ she said, when I took away her half-eaten scrambled eggs.

  ‘Go home for your holiday. Rest. Then resume your conquest of the world, I should.’

  ‘I can’t face them.’

  ‘You needn’t face them. That’s the point of decent families, I thought. You just crawl in there and recover. You don’t have to defend or excuse yourself.’

  I didn’t know that from personal experience, but it’s the manifesto of the Hearth and Home party.

  ‘That’s all balls,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell them about Clive. I shouldn’t have been having an affair with a married man anyway.’

  ‘So? It’s not up to them to judge you.’

  ‘Don’t you ever judge?’

  ‘Not my friends. That’s the point, isn’t it?’ I was lying, of course. I do judge. I just don’t let on I have. Behaviour is the test.

  ‘Alex the admirable,’ she said sarkily.

  I hung around for another hour, until Polly fell asleep on the sofa; I covered her with a duvet and went upstairs to prepare my questions for the interview with the Major.

  It was stuffy, a heavy London night, and not much better even when I opened all the windows in my living-
room. The warmish, damp air seeped in and hung: you could almost touch it. With the windows open, I could hear the traffic on Ladbroke Grove, and beyond it the rumble of heavy traffic on the Westway on the way to the M40. I ground some coffee beans, then while the cafetière plopped I pottered around putting the finishing touches to the post-party clear-up.

  Then I sugared a mug of coffee and listened to the messages on my answerphone. The first two began with thank yous for the party and went on to offer me work. Polly’s hacking was obviously a good idea. I pencilled in the dates, both much later in the year, and made a note to ring back. The third was a breathy, elfin, oddly accented gush. It wasn’t recognizably foreign: I couldn’t place it as French or Polish or Italian, straight off, but it wasn’t any English accent I knew. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so much the accent as the intonation that was unusual.

  I’d spent the duration of the message trying to place the voice. I had to run the tape back and play it again, for content. ‘Oh – hello – this is Claudia, Alan’s friend . . . Thanks tons for the party, it was terrific . . . such fun . . . Actually I really need to speak to you, Alex, could you ever ring me, if you get this . . . well of course you can’t ring me if you don’t . . .’ I took down her number automatically and forgot her call as I wrote the last digit. I didn’t even have time to wonder what she was calling about, because the fourth voice was Barty’s. He could have been in the room, and I wished he was.

  ‘Hello, Alex. Thanks for the party. How’s Polly? I wish you were in. It’s midnight. Give me a ring if you’re back before one. Otherwise ring tomorrow. I want to talk to you . . . Bye.’

  It was nearly two. Should I call now? For a moment my hand hovered over the phone. He wouldn’t mind being woken. But his ex-wife might . . . I’d ring tomorrow.

  I re-recorded the answerphone messages, adding the number of my Banbury hotel. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with the notes I’d taken from my conversation with Alan about his Headache series. I might have to demonstrate an easy mastery of it at Rissington Abbey in five hours’ time.

  Wednesday, June 3rd

  Chapter Eleven

  I left London at quarter to five, in case the Major was obsessive about punctuality. It was too early for Beethoven so I listened to the World Service and then the news on Radio 4. I have to keep up with what’s happening in the world. My job mostly depends on knowing about as many things as possible, so when I’m thrown in to find out the details, I have a framework to hang from. I routinely read three newspapers a day, preferably someone else’s, and I listen to Radio 4 as well. I could have done without Farming Today but I listened anyway. There’s always someone, somewhere in Europe, making a programme about the Common Agricultural Policy.

  I reached Banbury early and spent half an hour with a cup of coffee in a truckers’ café, full of men and steam and cigarette smoke. When I came out the sun was just beginning to be warm on my back. No sign of a cloud. We were getting all our summer in early June, as usual.

  The school, surrounded by its walled grounds, sat oddly in the scrubby north-east outskirts of Banbury, skirted by industrial estates and the new, still unconvincing landscaping of the M40. The drive was long, about a quarter of a mile, and the grass borders were mercilessly trimmed. All the grounds looked over-disciplined: the bushes pruned, the flowers planted in rows. Most of the work was probably done by the boys. At least twenty khaki-clad adolescent figures were hard at work in the grounds as I drove. Punishment or honour, I wondered. Whichever, they were all working hard: they hardly looked up as I passed.

  On the right of the drive was a line of trees: on the left, lawns, sloping down to a distant wall. Parallel to the wall, a group of older boys, almost men, were running at an impressive speed. They, too, were dressed in khaki, and although they were too far away for me to be sure, I thought they were wearing heavy boots. If so, their speed was even more impressive. They were led by someone wearing a blue tracksuit. The PE instructor? Whoever he was, he was very fit, and he ran like an athlete.

  It was like driving through an Army base. There were lots of little white signpost arrows with cryptic initials painted on them where the gravel roads crossed and where side roads went off. SH, they said, and MB, and DWA. I slowed down for six ramps and the Nissan bumped over them obligingly. The grounds were very large. I wondered what the property was worth, and how long it could remain here and resist the creeping industrialization all around it. The recession would help, of course. And the building regulations. Presumably the land was limited to educational use.

  A little arrow with the initials GHQ pointed to the gravel sweep in front of the main house. The layout was half-familiar to me from the photograph in the paper, and the Georgian house was rather beautiful. Someone unmilitary had protected the red creeper that covered half the front.

  I looked at my watch as I walked up the front steps. They were worn by generations of feet, first aristocratic, I presumed, now mostly army boots. I was two minutes early for my appointment. The front door, a large heavy one, was open, propped against a presently non-existent breeze by a foot-high black-painted iron bulldog. Winston Churchill?

  Inside, more doors, this time glass. It reminded me of Ashtons Hall, the Mayfields’ house, a main feature in my investigation last year, still an occasional feature in my dreams. But this was very different. If the Major had any sense, this would be the first and last time I ever came here. I’d have no time to get to know it.

  The hall was empty apart from one person, the Major. His face was the well-proportioned, square-jawed face I remembered from the newspaper photograph, but he was much smaller then I’d expected, only about five foot six, a trim figure in khaki, savagely upright as if to get every particle of height he could, with stiff back and shoulders. He was standing in front of an empty fireplace, looking at his watch impatiently. He must have been going deaf because he didn’t hear me come in, even though boots on a polished wooden floor can’t be noiseless. ‘Major Ellis?’

  ‘Miss Tanner! Good morning! This is the hall.’ Of course it was. I looked gratified, as if my idle speculation had been confirmed by his superior intellect and experience. He waved his arm at a large, mediocre portrait, painted in the fifties or early sixties, of a late middle-aged man in army uniform with plenty of medals, a white moustache, and a goggle-eyed pose which might have been intended to represent Leadership. ‘The Colonel. The previous headmaster and our founder.’

  ‘Ah.’ We shook hands. He was strong but not strong enough to crush my fingers. He squeezed, I squeezed back. His palm was damp and his face was sweating lightly. Unhealthy? Or nervous? He had well-defined pepper and salt eyebrows, a clearly marked pepper and salt hairline, and round brown brainless teddy-bear eyes which widened when they met mine. It was an automatic trick, perhaps another attempt at Leadership. But his carefully clipped moustache was just too big: it looked as if he’d borrowed it from a bigger brother for family charades. To impress adults, he’d have to do more than widen his eyes. His act might go down OK with the Lower Fourth.

  ‘Follow me. ‘These are the front stairs . . .’ He moved at a smart pace and I clumped behind him up the wide, shallow wooden staircase that looked as if it was designed for women, dressed for the evening, to make entrances down.‘I’m taking you to our private quarters. I can spare you thirty minutes, should be long enough, huh?’ The noise was a curious one. Not the American huh but a very English, semi-strangled grunt.

  ‘Should be,’ I agreed as we sped along a corridor, through a fire door, round a corner to a door marked Private. There were no boys in sight but there were voices and running footsteps as a constant background murmur. Clearly the school had been up some time.

  There was a tray waiting, with a teapot and cups. My heart sank. ‘Tea,’ he said. ‘Earl Grey. Milk or lemon?’ I accepted lemon. I dislike plain tea: I detest perfume-counter tea. But he drank it thirstily.

  I sat back in the place on the sofa that he’d pointed out to me, mimed sipping at my cup,
and looked around the room. It was L-shaped, probably once the master bedroom, predictably (Country Life would have said elegantly) proportioned with long sash windows and delicate plaster ceiling decorations of vine leaves and grapes. It had been furnished by someone equally uninterested in comfort or style, with an eclectic approach to floral prints. The sofa and armchairs (chintz-covered, cream background, giant blue roses) were ageing, middle-range John Lewis. The upholstery had gone and it was not easy to find buttock-sized spring-free regions. The curtains (chintz, yellow background, sub-William Morris tiger lilies) were almost tattered, the carpet (pink, yellow and green roses) was worn.

  So far, so predictable. Then I looked at the walls. My first impression had been of a battalion of photographs, in orderly rows. I expected them to be school groups, but I now saw they weren’t: they were arty shots, in black and white, slightly out of focus. It wasn’t easy to make out, from where I was sitting, exactly what the settings were, although most of them seemed to be outdoors.

  The pictures closest to me each featured a girl, probably the same girl, from early childhood (three?) to adulthood. She was never in the foreground: usually half-hidden by the branches of trees or dappled by light streaming into an interior. She had long, thick, curly dark hair and she was always dressed in the same type of garment, a thin pale dress, ankle-length, with short puff sleeves and a broad ribbon sash tied, at mid-rib level, in a bow at the back. As she matured the sash outlined her breasts.

  I couldn’t date them: no earlier than the twenties, probably, but that was as close as I could get. The model might be drawing her pension now, or she could be reading Media Studies at Hatfield Poly and taking her floaty dresses home to Mum to wash at weekends. But the Major would tell me about them soon enough, probably prefacing his remarks with ‘These are photographs.’