‘I wonder she doesn’t just move in,’ said Pam, merely toying with her food. ‘She might just as well.’
‘If I was her I wouldn’t want the responsibility,’ said Lottie. ‘By her account she’s only twenty-one herself.’
‘But it rather depends on what she’s after,’ said Pam.
‘Perhaps she’s not after anything,’ said Judith.
It was said magisterially. The other two cast a covert glance at each other, and remained silent. It was Judith who spoke next.
‘She strikes me as totally fresh, quite without guile,’ she said.
Pam gave a bitter little laugh.
‘On the other hand, Mike is in television,’ Lottie said.
‘Quite,’ snapped Pam. ‘And Nicholas is in clothes. I’m in radio, but she can’t cultivate both Judith and me, and Judith is the better bet. So there’s three members of the Originals worth cultivating, if you’re a schoolgirl with ambitions. And does she cultivate them! If she finds Mike’s clout as a technician doesn’t get her far, she’ll turn the full glare of her ambitions on to someone else.’
Pam’s eyes swerved sideways to Judith. Judith had been looking stonily ahead of her, with an expression that could only be described as mulish. It was obvious she was smitten.
‘In point of fact,’ said Lottie, ‘I’m not sure her ambitions are theatrical at all . . .’
Lottie heard Cybella’s reactions to the new order when she met her coming out of the hotel where she worked, at the end of a shift.
‘Long time no see,’ Lottie greeted her.
‘That’s right. I just don’t seem to have the time. And Mike’s kids don’t need me now. They’ve got Davina.’
‘She hasn’t quite moved in,’ Lottie protested.
‘Still, she’s around if they need anything.’
‘Mike’s an awfully good parent anyway,’ Lottie said.
‘Oh sure. Still, he tends to forget things, and he’s at his job all hours. Davina is a good backstop.’
‘You’re just too nice,’ muttered Lottie.
Really, Lottie meditated, you’d think Cybella would take her dislodgement from Mike’s household harder than that. Didn’t she see that Davina had designs?
Life in the group, at this point, went on pretty much as normal. They were in and out of each other’s houses, they lobbied for this cause or that, they sat on the floor with fork meals and put the world to rights. They still went to Mike’s house, though Lottie for one felt less free there, and none of them, naturally, brought up the subject of Davina there, even if she did not happen to be present. When she was there she sat with them quietly, apparently listening to the talk, whether it was of Peace, the environment, true Socialism, or the next step forward for women. Occasionally she would go with one or other of them to a meeting—a peace meeting with Judith, a feminist meeting with Pam, or to Mike’s splinter Trotskyite group, which she openly laughed at afterwards. She also laughed when Nicholas gave her a cod invitation to a ‘More Gays in Local Government’ meeting. She soon lost her shyness, and began contributing to the discussions—in a very negative, reductive and anti-idealistic way, Lottie thought. She was horrified when Gabriel—up for the weekend to see I Capuleti e i Montecchi—actually described her as an intelligent girl.
‘Intelligent?’ Lottie said, louder than was necessary. Gabriel, who was very involved with himself, and the environment, did not catch the warning note.
‘Yes. Awfully bright. And nice too. You’re lucky to have her around.’
Another one who’s been taken in, Lottie thought.
It was a day or two after this conversation that there was a further incident that made Lottie see that there were great changes coming in her world. She had gone over to Mike’s, Beth clinging to one hand, Eve to the other. But when she pushed Mike’s front door she found it was locked. She stood staring in disbelief. Mike’s door was never locked in the evening! There was always someone around then, and Mike said that to lock it was so bourgeois and property-conscious. But now she actually had to ring the doorbell.
‘Hello,’ said Davina, smiling very sweetly, but standing plumb in the doorway.
‘It was locked,’ said Lottie, starting in.
‘That’s right,’ said Davina, not moving. ‘Mike’s busy.’
‘Busy?’
‘Yes. He’s got a shooting schedule to organize, and it’s proving a bit of a problem.’
And since she actually went on standing there, Lottie had to turn round and go away. She was boiling. The incident summed up (she told Pam, to whom she resorted in her outrage) the difference one person could make to a group—even a happy, caring, fruitfully inter-relating group like theirs.
‘Of course I realize it’s only a matter of time before she moves in,’ she concluded.
And she was quite right. However, the announcement of it took a form rather different from what she had expected.
They were all at Mike’s except Gabriel, who was back at his commune. They were having a good evening, planning a big protest against the Channel Tunnel. Mike had sent his eldest out for pizzas from the Italian takeaway (they were using the various takeaways in the area more often these days, since Cybella was around less often), and everything was going with a swing until the pizzas had been cut up, and they had all collected glasses and gone along to the statutory winebox on the sideboard.
‘Wait!’ said Mike. ‘We’re having something special tonight. Fetch the champagne, Davina.’
It’s coming, Lottie thought. She said:
‘Champagne with pizzas?’
Three bottles of it, ready chilled in the ’fridge. Davina put them on the sideboard, and began getting out the cut-glass hock glasses.
‘The fact is, we’ve got a bit of an announcement to make.’ Mike grinned at them—his most charming grin. ‘You’ve probably guessed it already, but here goes: Davina and I are going to be married.’
Everyone but Lottie gave an amused groan.
‘I hope you mean shacked up,’ said Jonathan.
‘Well, actually no,’ Mike admitted. ‘We mean married.’
That really shocked some of them.
‘But you can’t!’ Lottie wailed. ‘After all you’ve said about marriage as a male-instituted vehicle for female slavery! We’ve all been agreed about that—always. And what about your own experience of it? You can’t, Mike. It would be a travesty of all you’ve ever believed in! It would be a betrayal!’
‘It will be a registry office do,’ said Mike, but hardly shamefaced.
‘You might as well have gone the whole hog and hired St Margaret’s, Westminster,’ said Judith scornfully.
‘Davina wanted a proper ceremony,’ said Mike, still good-humoured.
‘Oh, we never doubted who was behind it,’ said Lottie. ‘After all this pretence of being one of us—to entrap you into marriage!’
‘I do agree with a lot of your ideas,’ protested Davina. ‘Quite a lot of them. But if we’re going to live together, I want us to go into it intending it to be for good. You’ve got to face it, my generation sees things differently from yours. We’re just not as radical as you were.’
Outraged middle-aged faces stared at her, pop-eyed. They had been put in the past tense!
‘What poisonous rubbish!’ Lottie said. ‘Of course young people are radical. That’s why we feel so close to them—we’ve retained our ideals.’
Davina shook her head. Marriage was making her determined.
‘You’re wrong. Young people have seen through a lot of your ideas. I think you just haven’t noticed.’
‘She’s right,’ said Terry, Mike’s eldest, who hardly ever spoke when they were all round there. ‘You’re still living back in the ’sixties, you lot. It’s pathetic.’
The way he said it, he could have been talking about the eighteen-sixties. It hit them like a wet towel. Tears of mortification stung Lottie’s eyes, and she sat silent for several minutes. When she began to recover her self-possession, she was struck a second blow: t
he others seemed to have come round. Even Judith (who perhaps had never had any very serious hopes of getting an act together with Davina) was being rather jolly, and before long they were all laughing and chaffing and drinking toasts to Benedick the married man.
Lottie tried to drink, but she couldn’t get a sip down.
‘I’m sorry, it’d choke me,’ she said, and walked from the room. She did not extinguish the merriment. As she shut the front door she heard laughter from the sitting-room. Well, at least she’d made it clear that she was one person who wouldn’t compromise her principles.
It was six days later that Lottie heard Davina was dead. She met Cybella in the late afternoon in the greengrocer’s, Lottie clutching her courgettes and Cybella looking terribly upset.
‘Have you heard?’
‘No. Heard what?’
‘Davina’s dead. Died this morning.’
Lottie was overcome. She sat down on a packing case outside the greengrocer’s, her head swimming.
‘It’s horrible. I’m not going to pretend I liked her, but a young life like hers . . . You shouldn’t have broken it like that.’
‘Sorry. I thought you’d have known.’
‘I haven’t been . . . going around much these last few days. How did it happen?’
‘They were on their way to see the vicar of St Matthew’s. You knew Davina had persuaded Mike to have a church wedding after all?’
‘She hadn’t!’ Lottie’s outrage was such that she almost seemed to suggest that Davina was well punished.
‘She had—if it was possible, Mike being divorced, and all that. They were on their way to have this talk with the vicar, and as they went up the drive Davina took out her mouth-spray—you know what she was like about personal freshness—and as soon as she sprayed it in, she gagged and said “ugh”, and by the time Mike was ringing the doorbell of the vicarage she was vomiting. She died a few minutes later in the vicar’s study.’
‘Good Lord! But how on earth—?’
‘I just don’t know. But they’ve called the police in.’
Lottie’s first thought was: now, if ever, we ought to be supportive as a group. She hurried over to Mike’s, but she was met by Terry in the hall, and he said his dad was too upset to see anyone. He’d been with the police all afternoon, and now he was up in his room, still in a state of shock.
‘Does anyone know how it happened?’ Lottie asked.
‘Cyanide in the mouth-spray,’ said Terry, but Lottie could get nothing more out of him.
That, at any rate, was something to pass on. Though the Originals had been a bit splintered since the announcement of the engagement—or at least Lottie had been splintered off from the rest—now everything would be back to normal. However, Lottie found that Nicholas and Jonathan were on their way out to a gay disco (which was a bit too ‘life must go on’, she thought), and Pam came to the door and said that Judith was just too bowled over to talk about it. So in the end Lottie had to go back home and thrash it out with Gabriel (up for Ballo in Maschera), who of course knew nothing beyond what she could tell him.
More facts emerged over the next day or two. The mouth-spray had been in Davina’s bathroom for two or three weeks, and she had not used it because she had another in her handbag. When this was used up, she replaced it with the new one. Lottie had often commented on Davina’s finickiness, how aware she was of the impression she made on others, on her spraying herself here and there all the time. ‘I’d never have called attention to it, if I’d realized,’ she said now.
The spray, apparently, was a perfectly simple one, and it had a screw top, so probably anyone could have interfered with it. At least, anyone with access to Davina’s flatlet.
‘And that means us,’ said Nicholas to Lottie, when they met in the street two days after Davina’s death.
‘Oh come: it could be anyone. She had family.’
‘A mother, crippled with arthritis. Davina went to visit her, not vice versa.’
‘Friends . . .’
‘We were her friends. She didn’t have any others that she was on visiting terms with. She’d just moved into the district, remember.’
‘I do think you’re talking nonsense,’ Lottie said firmly. ‘I’m just not going to believe it has anything to do with any of us. We’re all dedicated to non-violence.’
‘I’d love to see you telling that to the police,’ said Nicholas. ‘I can just see the expressions on their faces.’
And, to her surprise, Lottie found that the police did want to interview her. In fact, they talked to all the Westbury Originals in turn, because they quite soon found out from the young man in the bed-sit over the landing to Davina that they were the only people likely to have had access to Davina’s flatlet. Lottie had in fact only been to Davina’s once, and she told Jonathan she bitterly regretted it, though as Jonathan said, the police would probably say she’d have had access to her handbag, and thus to the spray, whether she’d been to the flat or not.
‘Not if she’d only just put the new spray in,’ said Lottie. ‘I hadn’t seen her for days. Then I’d have been free of all this murk, and suspicion, and nastiness . . .’
Lottie found it a funny feeling, talking to the police. She’d always been instinctively anti, of course, ‘knowing how rape victims suffer at their hands,’ as she said to Pam, ‘not to mention anti-nuclear protesters, and anyone really caring in our society.’ She had to admit afterwards that the particular policeman who interviewed her was not actually violent, but she said she could feel violence in the atmosphere.
The Superintendent, whose name was Sutcliffe, took her briskly through the background—no doubt it was the briskness that gave Lottie the feeling of violence in the atmosphere. He showed signs of irritation when Lottie tried to elaborate on what a wonderful, mutually supportive collection of people they were, but she managed to make the point nevertheless.
‘We’re just a tremendously close, caring lot of men and women,’ she concluded.
‘I see. But Miss Stubbs was quite a new member of the group, wasn’t she?’
‘That’s right. She only moved here five or six weeks ago.’
‘But you were all close and caring towards her? She fitted in well?’
‘Wonderfully well.’
Lottie felt a tiny twinge when she said that. But how could she hurt Mike by making public what she really thought of Davina? And how could she bring the Originals further under suspicion by making clear to the policeman what they felt? The trouble was, Sutcliffe’s scepticism, which had previously sailed over Lottie’s head, now became more pronounced.
‘Miss Stubbs was a shop assistant,’ he said carefully.
‘That’s right. A salesperson.’
‘Most of you are in rather more exciting occupations.’
‘More creative, certainly.’
‘And yet she was part of your group—’
‘We’re not snobs!’
‘—and you were all of you in and out of each other’s homes?’
‘She was always in and out of Mike’s!’ This came out fast, and Lottie felt at once that it gave the wrong impression. She added: ‘But of course you know why that was. Actually, I can’t recall her ever being in my house, and I was only once in hers.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Oh, about ten days ago, I suppose. To return a book. It was just before she and Mike announced their engagement.’
‘But the others may have been there more often?’
‘Possibly. You’d have to ask. Davina was modelling now and then for Nicholas, so he probably went there to try things on her—with Jonathan, most likely. Judith may well have been there a fair bit, but Pam was most unlikely to have. Gabriel was never there, so far as I know. Cybella seemed to like her, so I should think she dropped in from time to time.’
‘Thank you,’ said Superintendent Sutcliffe, pondering. ‘That tells me quite a lot. I take it, from what you say, that Judith was attracted to her, Nicholas found her useful, C
ybella liked her as a person, while you and Pam were dubious or downright hostile.’
‘No, really, that’s not true—’
‘Now let’s come to this engagement. Did it set the cat among the pigeons?’
Lottie was annoyed. She felt rushed, confused and wondered whether she was making the right impression.
‘Well, I mean an engagement. We’re all madly against marriage—Mike as much as anyone, until then. We have no time for the dominance-submission pattern it implies. So we all—the rest of us, that is—did think it sad for Mike to dwindle into marriage. Of course, if they’d just been sleeping together, that would have been another matter.’
‘I see . . . Do you think that the marriage may have been the catalyst behind this?’
‘Certainly not!’ protested Lottie. ‘Absolutely unthinkable. It’s nonsense to imagine anyone else could be involved—I mean, any of us. The thing must have been poisoned before she brought it home, that’s what I think. Have you thought of the other salespersons in David Lewis’s?’
‘Yes, we have. Unfortunately your theory hits a snag. This mouth-spray is called Autumnfresh, and it’s not yet on general sale. The head of the cosmetics section had three samples sent her, and she kept one for herself and gave out two to two of the . . . salespersons, just before the store closed for the day. Davina was one, and she remembers her putting hers straight into her handbag and going off with it. We’ve inspected the other two sprays, and they’re perfectly innocuous. Since the head of the cosmetics section was very friendly with Davina, and thought her an excellent salesperson, we have no reason to suspect her.’
‘I see,’ said Lottie, digesting this information.
‘Now, about this engagement . . .’
And off they went again. It soon became apparent to Lottie, rather to her chagrin, that he not only knew more than he had let on, but in some respects he knew a lot more than she did. He knew that Gabriel had taken Davina to I Capuleti, and had gone home with her afterwards. That shocked Lottie, and she had to bite back the opinion that the experience would have been wasted on one of Davina’s intelligence. Sutcliffe knew that Judith had been a fairly frequent visitor to Davina’s flat when Mike was working—though he also mentioned Judith’s claim that ‘nothing had happened’. He asked if Lottie thought that Pam would have been jealous, and Lottie said she was sure Pam would have been quite happy about it, or at any rate that she would have been ‘civilized.’
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