Tom Wilde walked against the tide. He took a deep breath. God, he needed a proper drink. He loved this place; but in many ways he loathed it, too. Ranged down the south side of the new court, the library with its exquisite Gothic tracery was one of the finest in Cambridge, a repository for books and papers going back to medieval times. But the other facilities left much to be desired, particularly the bathroom amenities. The miserable trudge of undergraduates in their pyjamas crossing the courts in quest of a bath seemed to dwindle to almost nothing in the winter months.
The lack of bathrooms was one of the reasons he lived out of college; but he also had an aversion to the school-like claustrophobia of the place. Some fellows never wanted to leave its limited confines, but a college was a society of men, and Wilde had never been entirely certain that he wished to belong to such a society.
The fog outside in the new court was somewhat fresher than the fug of the Combination Room. No sign of Christmas snow yet and not much in the way of cheer. At the main gate, the broad-shouldered head porter, Scobie, tipped his black top hat, then rubbed his bristling moustache and said there was no chance of ice on the Fens, so no skating for the undergraduates before they went down.
‘Nothing like a game of ice hockey to get the blood pumping, Scobie.’
‘I can imagine, sir. Never tried it myself.’
‘Well, good night.’ Wilde removed his square and shoved it under his arm, then walked on, his hands in his pockets.
It was the first day of December. The streets were alive with people on foot and, seemingly, even more on bicycles. Men in coats and hats, making their way home from offices and factories or college rooms and laboratories. Many were smoking, their mouths and fingers busy with pipes and cigarettes, puffing smoke into the grey swirl of fog and smoke from ten thousand chimneys. A town full of smoke, soot blackening the ancient stones.
There was an air of the university winding down for the festive season. Michaelmas term was almost done. Soon the undergraduates would leave their rooms, their gowns and their bicycles and take the train home from the long platform, scattering to the far corners of the realm, leaving the town to those who lived and worked here and the colonial students whose people were too far away to be joined for the holidays. Once again Cambridge would revert to what it had always been: a modest English market town that just happened to have a collection of some of the country’s most magnificent buildings and the world’s greatest brains.
Town and gown. The host and worm intertwined, and yet the worm grown more magnificent than the host. Living side by side yet separately, a symbiotic relationship. The town did not need the university to survive, for it had prospered alone before the scholars arrived seven hundred years earlier and would do so again if the scholars left. And nor did the university need this particular town. Food and servants could be got anywhere.
But there was something about Cambridge at Christmas, thought Wilde as he pressed on through the crowds. The spires of King’s College Chapel against a winter sky, the Backs sharp with frost, the cheerful busyness of a town celebrating on its own account. He’d spend the day with his neighbour, Lydia Morris, and the waifs and strays who congregated at her house on high days and holidays, he decided. He smiled to himself. Which did she think he was? Waif or stray?
At times he wasn’t quite sure why he stayed in England. It had been made clear to him that he would be welcomed at Harvard. Or that he could leave academia altogether and join the state department or the diplomatic service like his oldest friend, Jim Vanderberg. Perhaps it was his subject that kept him here, close to the places Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Robert Cecil knew so well. His mother, now widowed, lived in Boston, preferring the ease of the New World to the privations of the old one. He hadn’t seen her in two years and he knew she missed him as much as he missed her. But perhaps he was here in England because America brought back too many memories. The love of his life lost, a child dead at birth.
He stopped at the Bull Hotel, downed a large Scotch and felt a lot better for it. The lounge bar was filling up nicely. It reeked of beer and smoke. Local businessmen argued over the price of corn; college dons discussed the world, the universe and the quality of hall dinners and claret. Most of all, they talked of delicious scandals usually involving ambition or sex or both. It was a masculine place, as were the colleges themselves, all save Girton and Newnham. It didn’t occur to these men that their women might like a drink at the end of the day and if they did, well, they could always raid the bottle hidden in the dresser for a sip of sherry.
Wilde stood alone, at the end of the bar, his shoulder turned away from the next man, who wore a cheap suit and looked like a clerk. When he ordered another drink, the barman tried to engage him in conversation about the Crystal Palace fire but Wilde simply smiled vaguely as people do when they have no wish to be rude, but do not want to engage. The clerk inadvertently saved him by calling for a pint of stout. Wilde slid his empty tumbler across the bar and made his escape, slipping back out into the fog. He wanted nothing more than to go home, get away from the crowds, fix himself a ham omelette and settle down with a book and Bessie Smith. A pigfoot and a bottle of beer. Heaven on earth. He enjoyed his own company and when he wanted conversational sparring, why, there was Lydia next door to stretch his wit.
Wilde was passing her gate when he spotted her new lodger walking up the path towards him, hands shoved deep in his pockets, flat cap perched on his brow. ‘Good evening, Mr Braithwaite,’ he said with a cursory nod, scarcely breaking his stride
‘Hang on a minute.’
Wilde stopped. ‘Yes?’
‘Just saying hello, Mr Wilde. Passing the time of day with a neighbour.’
‘Good, well, hello then, Mr Braithwaite. Feeling fit and strong for the next part of your journey, I hope?’
‘Getting there, Mr Wilde. Getting there.’
Leslie Braithwaite was chewing tobacco. A stream of thin, brown fluid dribbled from the corner of his thin, pinched lips. He was a short man, barely five feet tall, with bowed legs, a clear case of childhood malnourishment and rickets if ever Wilde had seen one. How far removed from the healthy, well-fed figures of Maxwell and Felsted.
His forehead and nose were scarred by blue lines beneath his flat cap: the unmistakable marks of the collier. He had arrived a week ago, throwing himself on Lydia’s charity. ‘I’ve come from Yorkshire, miss, walking to the Kent pits. I’m told there’s jobs to be had. Someone gave me your name and address, said you’d stand a stranger a meal, perhaps a bed for the night. Cold at the roadside, miss.’
Lydia had responded in the way she always did to those in need and offered him a room, a bath and food. The bath had been particularly welcome; his clothes had been rank and ragged and she had washed those, too, handing him some new socks and a shirt from a charity bag that she kept for such eventualities. Since then, however, he had shown no sign of moving on.
‘What do you think of the news, then, Mr Wilde?’
‘The Crystal Palace fire? I have no opinion on it, but I’m sure you’ll tell me who started it. Everyone else has this evening.’ Wilde began to move away towards his own gate but Braithwaite grasped his arm.
‘Not the fire, the King of England and his fancy piece.’ Braithwaite’s little eyes glittered.
‘Now you’ve lost me.’ In truth Wilde knew all about the King and Mrs Simpson. He had been apprised of the full facts by colleagues returning from foreign lecture tours and by his mother in her letters. It seemed all the world’s newspapers were full of the great romance. All save the British papers. Wilde had heard, too, from the senior tutor that there were machinations in Whitehall; that the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had vowed to let the government fall rather than allow Edward to marry Wallis. There was talk, too, of Churchill forming a King’s Party so that he could step into the breach and support Edward. To date, however, Wilde had seen not a word in the London press. The British, it seemed, were the only people in the world not allowed to know wha
t their King and government were up to.
‘Mate of mine showed me an American newspaper he got sent, Mr Wilde. Edward Windsor’s got his grubby fingers in the drawers of a slattern named Simpson.’
Wilde laughed.
Braithwaite grinned, too, then snorted with undisguised scorn. ‘Royal bloody family. They’re all the same. Leeches feeding off the sweat and blood of the poor. Lenin had the right idea. Line them all up against a wall and let rip with a Vickers.’
‘Do I take it you have communist sympathies, Mr Braithwaite?’
‘Card-carrying member. Same as anyone with half a brain.’
‘Well, you won’t be alone in this town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must get home. Essays to mark, a lecture to prepare.’ Novels to read, music to be listened to. In truth, he was hungry and tired and wanted time to himself.
‘Your problem, Mr Wilde, is that you don’t know what it’s like for the working man. I never used an indoor lav until last week when I came into this house. You haven’t seen starving, freezing children scrabbling for coal on the slag heap. Go up to the Yorkshire pits one day, see what it’s really like. I tell you this, you’d join the party, too.’
‘I shall make a note of your advice.’
‘Don’t suppose you could lend us a couple of bob for a drink, could you?’
Wilde laughed again, but not so good-humouredly. He took out a shilling. ‘That’s your lot, I’m afraid.’
*
Outside the cinema on Market Hill, Lydia Morris shivered in her duffle coat as the temperature fell. The film was about to start and Nancy hadn’t arrived. Why could she never be on time?
Not that Lydia cared a great deal whether she saw the film or not. It was Things to Come, a nightmarish vision of a second great war and poison bombs dropped from the air onto cities. Not the cheeriest subjects for a dreary December evening. It was Nancy who had demanded they see it. She had said she wanted to see Lydia; she had said she wanted to talk about things, about a call she’d had from their mutual friend Margot, of all people. She was troubled, and, thought Lydia, she had sounded a little afraid.
‘Your boyfriend not turned up, miss?’ the commissionaire said.
‘What makes you think I’m waiting for a boyfriend?’ She smiled at the chippy little man in his ridiculous uniform with its Ruritanian epaulettes and buttons.
He eyed her up and down, trying to appraise her figure, hidden beneath her unflattering coat. ‘You’re a good-looking girl. Bound to have a suitor.’
She held up the tickets. ‘Can I get my money back on these?’
‘Non-refundable, I’m afraid, miss.’
A shilling down the drain. ‘What a surprise.’
‘Tell you what, you go in and if your friend comes along, I’ll bring him in to you. How does that sound?’
‘No, thank you. I’ll just wait out here a little longer.’
‘Very well, miss.’
She shuffled away and pulled her knitted hat down over her ears. Beneath the old duffle coat, she wore thick woollen stockings and a long paisley skirt, which she hated. Her neighbour Tom Wilde had once told her she dressed to avoid attention while other women rather liked to attract it. She had retorted that he should stop talking in stereotypes and look to his own unkempt appearance. ‘It wasn’t meant as a criticism,’ he had said, laughing. ‘I like your tattered, somewhat eccentric appearance. You look Bohemian. Just the way a poet should be.’
‘You’re piling insult upon insult, do you realise that? You’re telling me I’m a poet cliché.’
‘Well, let’s put it this way then. You’re the only woman I know who never carries a handbag.’
That had made her laugh. ‘You know just how to win a girl’s heart!’
‘You flatter yourself, Miss Morris.’
To avoid the commissionaire’s gaze, she pretended to study the new shoes in the window of Freeman Hardy Willis next door to the cinema. Nancy must be slumped in a doped-up stupor somewhere. That stuff was going to do her no good. She seemed to need it more and more. So much for the career in newspapers she claimed she was looking for.
Nancy had never been reliable, but her behaviour had become even more erratic lately. Lydia was beginning to wonder whether her friend might be on the verge of a breakdown. She said the heroin calmed her down, made her rows with her father more bearable, but it wasn’t convincing. Berlin in August seemed to have been a tipping point. Something had happened there the day she vanished, but she wouldn’t say what.
Across the road there was a telephone box but she couldn’t for the life of her recall the number of Nancy’s newly installed telephone. Nothing to do but wait. After another ten minutes, Lydia decided she could wait no longer. ‘Here.’ She handed the tickets to the commissionaire. ‘Give them to someone you like the look of. An early Christmas present.’
Her breath blew vapour trails into the fog as she hurried along Bridge Street and over Magdalene Bridge. Below her, the river was slow and ominous, the punts-for-hire all put away for winter.
Ahead of her, the Pikeling was horribly raucous for a Tuesday evening and she gave the pub a wide berth. She had been pawed too often by stragglers lurching out into the street. Even her roughest clothes didn’t seem to put them off. Passing Magdalene College, she turned right into Chesterton Road and walked along the river, the town’s artery, bringer of produce from the fertile Fens on sedate, heavily laden barges. This, too, was where the pleasure boats plied their trade in summer, steaming up and down river with laughing, singing bands of men and women on works outings from the Pye factory.
Here were gentle banks of grass leading down to the water’s muddy edge, in the shade of willows. It was all deserted now, but in the summer months young men and boys dozed here, keeping half an eye on the procession of punts. Lydia had known many such days, and had more than one reason to remember them. She shook the memories away; this was winter and all was forlorn and quiet and cold and the smell that rose from the river was very different from the warm, reedy aroma of summer.
The walk was no more than twenty minutes, but it felt like over an hour before she arrived at Nancy’s rented house. It was at the end of a small Victorian terrace in the suburb of Chesterton. Hardly the sort of place a girl like Nancy, brought up in a country manor and a college master’s lodge, was used to, but nice enough.
The curtains were open and the lights were on, so Lydia knocked at the door and waited. There was no reply. She tried the door handle, but it was locked. She peered in through the bay window; books and newspapers piled up on the bare floorboards, but no sign of Nancy. Suddenly Lydia was angry: couldn’t she have rung to cancel the film? She had her own telephone, for heaven’s sake.
She called through the letterbox. Nothing.
The stout, elderly woman who lived next door came out and stood on her step, arms folded across her bosom. ‘I think you’re wasting your time, love. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Miss Hereward all day,’ she said.
‘We were supposed to be going to the cinema. I don’t suppose she leaves a key with you, does she, Mrs—’
‘Bromley. And yes, we have a key. The landlord asks us to keep it.’
‘I thought she might be ill in bed. Perhaps a fever. She might need a doctor.’
‘Fever? Is that what they call it these days? You know she has men in there? The noises I hear . . .’ She pursed respectable lips. ‘I’ll get it for you.’
Mrs Bromley bustled off and came back with a key. ‘Here you are, love. You go in. I don’t like to intrude.’
Lydia didn’t want to go in alone. ‘I’m sure Nancy will understand if you’d like to come with me.’
The woman glanced in through the bay window and grimaced with distaste. ‘No, I’ll wait out here if it’s all the same to you. Wouldn’t feel right.’
Lydia shrugged. She put the key in the lock and turned it. Her heart was pounding. She turned to Mrs Bromley but the woman wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘Mr Bromley said he he
ard a noise early this morning while I was out at Woolworths.’
‘Noise, what sort of noise?’
‘A loud noise. Like someone crying out.’
The door opened and Lydia stepped inside. She took off her hat and stuffed it in her coat pocket. ‘Nancy,’ she called. Nothing. The sitting room smelt of dust and damp. In the little kitchen she spotted a full cup of tea and put her hand to it. The cup was cold. There was a bottle of fresh milk, which showed that someone had, at least, been here recently. She called again, her voice quieter now and beseeching. ‘Is anyone there?’
She walked up the bare staircase. The boards creaked and echoed beneath her feet. All the lights were on up here, too, naked bulbs with no shades. On the right was the bathroom. Directly ahead of her was the lavatory, its door open, the chain hanging from the cistern like the rope on a gibbet.
On the left was the only other room. The door was open. Relief washed over her. Nancy was lying on her side facing her, eyes closed, fast asleep. But hope dissolved as she realised there was no sound of breathing, no movement. And then there was the faint unwholesome whiff of vomit, and two flies began to buzz.
Nancy was in a powder-blue silk slip, nothing more. Her dark hair, cut shorter since Lydia had last seen her, fell across her slender throat. Her left hand was trapped beneath her body; her right hand was bent back, fingers splayed, as though she were about to catch a ball. Lydia took hold of the wrist. The skin was cold and clammy. There was no pulse. Lydia put her hands to her friend’s dead face but there was no one there.
Nancy was lying on rumpled sheets and blankets. The sheets were good white linen, but stained. Vomit, blood, semen? A glint caught Lydia’s eye. Nancy’s silver syringe. She looked again at Nancy’s clawed hand, her eyes following the line of the muscles and dried blood down along her arm to the place where needle holes clustered like blots on a pad.
Corpus Page 4