Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘No, no, Monty, you’re right really. So am I. Neither of us can bear it, now we know the truth.’ A suppressed sob tore her throat, and Cathy cried until her face ached, but still more tears came and she could not stop them. She cried for the tragedy of both their parents’lives, for the pain of her father’s loss which she suppressed every day, and most of all for the fear of losing Monty, who held her until at last the storm of weeping was ended.

  They were silent for a long while, then at last Monty said, ‘I didn’t mean it. I can’t handle this either. It’s too much.’

  ‘We can do anything if we do it together.’ Cathy wiped her wet cheeks with her sleeves, oblivious of the marks on the silk.

  ‘Did you mean that about reopening the inquest?’ Monty helped her to get up.

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t decide. Yes, she ought to be charged with murder, for killing that girl if not for killing our father. But that’s not why I want to call in the police. I want revenge for what she did to Daddy, just like she wanted revenge for what he did to her. And I don’t want revenge for Daddy’s sake, either, I can’t pretend that. I want it for me, because I can’t believe in him any more as my wonderful, adorable father. I’m no better than she is, am I? And I’m frightened, I just want to stop her, Monty. I’m so scared that she’ll destroy our lives like she did his – she’s so full of hate.’

  ‘What do we do – call Scotland Yard?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it, Monty, could you?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t turn her in, she’s our mother, whatever else she might be. And we can’t be absolutely certain, either. We’re guessing, that’s all. We need to be sure.’

  ‘Lord Shrewton’s the only one who’s acted decently, I’d like to have his advice,’ Cathy decided at last. As she had anticipated, her former father-in-law declined to take any decisions for them but calmly suggested that they first assemble all the evidence against the Princess and take the advice of lawyers before proceeding any further.

  At Pasterns Mr Napier, now a portly, balding man with a red face and pinstriped trousers, tried to talk them out of taking any official action. ‘It’ll be a beastly affair, a stain on your own children’s lives …’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ Monty told him with irritation. ‘Our children’s lives are their own to create as they choose. They’ll be responsible for what they are, just as we are.’

  ‘What about the stains on our lives, Mr Napier?’ Cathy asked in her most reasonable voice. ‘It wasn’t very pleasant, coming out as the daughter of the Suicide Peer, hearing everybody whispering every time I came into a room. I loved my father, Mr Napier, and this woman took him away from me just when I needed him most. I can’t put that right, I can’t turn the clock back and have my life over again.’ Until she spoke those painful words, Cathy had never admitted, even to herself, how painful it had been to face publicly the scandal of her father’s death. She had been brave, and thought only of making good his loss by marrying gloriously. Now at last she acknowledged the pain she had felt.

  ‘You certainly have an immense volume of evidence here, but the final connection between the murder, this Madame person – if she exists – and the Princess is not, in my opinion, proved at all. Without an admission from her you would really have no case,’ he announced with finality, dismissing the stack of grey document boxes which contained sworn statements by. Bill Treadwell in Penang, Lord Shrewton, and the sisters themselves, as well as reports from the two investigators they had briefed. Feeling almost superstitiously afraid, Cathy had copied the entire file and lodged a duplicate volume in a bank vault.

  Mr Napier’s condescending professional superiority had the effect of making both Cathy and Monty more positively determined to bring their mother to justice.

  ‘He’s being cautious, that’s a lawyer’s job,’ Lord Shrewton observed. ‘And he’s right, you’ll need concrete evidence if you’re hoping to reopen the inquest and then proceed to a prosecution. I think we should hear what the police have to say, don ‘t you?’

  The City Police are a species which considers itself separate from the drab run of average British officers of the law. Their responsibility is restricted to London’s ancient heart, the square mile and three-quarters which is now the city’s business district, and the crimes which concern them are almost exclusively minor parking offences and major frauds. This latter category attracts officers of far keener intelligence than most branches of police work, and requires them to maintain close and friendly relations with the people who control the nation’s wealth.

  In consequence, Chief Inspector Kitchener was more like a business associate of Lord Shrewton than a police detective, and when the sisters agreed to consult him they were reassured by his relaxed, practical manner. He was a small, wiry man with keen blue eyes who listened to them courteously and said at length, ‘You’re right to approach this cautiously. I can understand that you’re in two minds about the whole business, it must have been quite a lot to take in.’ Cathy and Monty nodded at once, grateful for his sympathy.

  ‘She’s not unknown to us, the Madame figure – that side of her operations at least. We’ve investigated two or three other cases, similar in that there was an intention to blackmail. She’s a very dangerous woman. We can pursue this with our colleagues in the Súreté in Paris, but I’ve little doubt that she has very highly placed contacts and probably we won’t get very far. It’ll be much more satisfactory if we can handle this in London. Do you think there’s any chance we can get her to come here? If we do that, and if our suspicions are correct, I can hold her on a passport offence while we make our own investigations. From the documents you’ve got here, it’s clear that she didn’t produce her own birth certificate when she was married, or when she applied for her passport either. With her out of the way here, we’ll be able to proceed more easily.’

  ‘I can invite her over on a business matter. She won’t be able to resist, I suspect.’ Cathy felt a thrill of apprehension. She knew that the Princess must have been suspicious of their sudden departure from L’Equipe Créole, so soon after her first official meeting with Monty. But she had no reason to fear a meeting with her daughters, particularly if it were possible that they had at last discovered that she was their mother.

  They arranged the meeting exactly as Cathy always fixed meetings with her most important clients. Her secretary telephoned the Princess’s secretary and asked for the earliest possible date on which the Princess could come to London on an urgent matter. The reply came within half an hour, and the Princess arranged to come two days later and asked for a car to meet her private plane at Lydd Airport and bring her to London.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Hussain advised her at once. ‘Ayeshah, think. We know they know almost everything now. You’ve had them followed out to Penang, you know they’ve seen Treadwell, they found the scent of the Nadine affair, followed that up. The older one at least is a very intelligent woman, and she has a high moral character, I think. They know who you are, what you are, to them as well as what you are in yourself. This meeting can’t bring you any good.’

  ‘The younger one is different – warmer, more emotional. She may have persuaded her sister, who knows? She can’t wish me any harm. Don’t forget I know a few things about her.’ Ayeshah was perfectly composed, although her elation was so strong that he saw her hands were trembling. Nothing, he realized, would stop her pursuing this final victory; she would not be checked even by the knowledge of almost certain danger to herself.

  Hussain shook his greying head with exasperation. A hundred times in the past two decades he had wished that the tie which bound him to his wife could be severed, but now that he sensed the possibility that she might be in danger he found the loneliness of life without her impossible to contemplate.

  ‘For the last time, I implore you, Ayeshah, don’t go. It’s a trap.’

  She laughed, a bitter, joyless sound which grated on his heart. ‘They couldn’t trap me, Hussain. How, what could they do? Nothing witho
ut blackening their own names, and that of their father, and giving their own children a scandal to live down the rest of their lives.’

  ‘Maybe they are brave enough to do that.’

  ‘Brave! Don’t talk like a child. Stupid is what it would be and you say yourself they’re not stupid. You will see that I’m right. I shall have my girls at last. They are my children, they love me.’

  ‘I’ll give you full security cover,’ Inspector Kitchener told the sisters.

  ‘Is that really necessary?’ Monty demanded. ‘She’s only one tiny woman, after all.’

  ‘There’s no way of knowing what kind of back-up she’ll arrange for herself and I’m taking no chances,’ he replied.

  ‘We’re in your hands, of course,’ Cathy reassured him. ‘But could I ask just one thing? If things should turn out as badly as we suspect they may, and she is involved in the murder, and you decide to arrest her … I’d rather it wasn’t done in my office.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly.’ The Inspector shuffled his feet, for the first time embarrassed by the emotional dilemma in which the two women were caught.

  The police planned the operation carefully, and as the golden Rolls Royce which met the Princess left the tiny airfield and began its journey to London across the flat grey expanse of Romney Marsh, an anonymous blue Ford fell into the line of traffic a few cars behind it. As the road meandered northwards the two cars followed the same route, the Ford maintaining a discreet distance between them.

  In an hour the vehicles were proceeding slowly through the grimy wasteland of the city’s south-eastern fringes. Their progress was halting, from one queue of traffic to the next, until they crossed the Thames at Westminster and quit the main flow of traffic to speed along Horseguards Parade. It was a keen, cold morning a few days before Christmas and London was packed with shoppers. The streets were jammed with slow-moving traffic, and in Regent Street and Oxford Street the illuminated decorations were reflected in the plate-glass windows of the busy stores. In St James’s Park the trees raised leafless branches to the gunmetal sky, and office workers walked hurriedly to lunchtime destinations, their arms folded over their coats for warmth.

  Cathy stood by the window in her office, looking down at the traffic-clogged street below. She felt fearful, a sensation to which she was not accustomed. Apprehension was like a pain under her ribs, burning intensely and spreading out through her limbs. The more she tried to suppress her fear, the stronger it grew.

  ‘Are you scared?’ Monty asked, from her perch on the edge of Cathy’s marble-topped table. She was dressed unusually smartly, with a crisp, white piqué shirt under her black suit and a small diamond brooch at the collar.

  ‘Yes. I’m terrified of her, isn’t it strange? I know that I’ve got the right to do this, that this is what we ought to do, but I can’t get rid of the feeling that it’s wrong too.’

  ‘I’m scared too, scared that when I see her I won’t be able to go through with it. How can we do this to our own mother?’

  ‘By thinking of what she’s done to us, to our father, and to heaven knows how many other people.’ Resolutely, Cathy turned away from the window, the skirt of her dark grey suit swinging with each decisive step. ‘I’ve seen the car at the end of the street – she’ll be here in a minute.’ The golden Rolls Royce at last crawled to the kerb outside the building’s entrance below, and the doorman went to open the door.

  Rapidly, Cathy crossed the room and pressed a button on the console of a black telephone in the conversation area of her office. ‘Can you hear OK?’ she asked.

  From the next room she heard Lord Shrewton’s voice, unemotional as ever. ‘Loud and clear,’ he reassured her.

  ‘Have you seen her yet?’ asked Joe’s rich American voice.

  ‘Outside right now. I’m leaving the phone switched through now, you’ll hear everything.’ Cathy had removed the tiny lightbulb in the console which indicated that the microphone was activated, and when she replaced the receiver, the telephone looked as if it were not in use.

  Monty was at the window. In the street below the small figure of the Princess, moving with its characteristic reptilian quickness and half-buried in a close-fitting pale mink coat, stepped out of the car.

  A few minutes later the Princess Ayeshah was standing in front of them, the force of her personality filling the room. She was plainly in the grip of high emotion which was held in check by her uncertainty. She did not know what to expect, and was unable to take control of the situation. Cathy at once seized the initiative. Cool out, she told herself, make it normal, get this crazy situation mastered before it explodes in our faces.

  ‘Good morning, Princess, I hope you had a pleasant journey?’ Cathy herself took the blond mink coat and handed it to her secretary. In a severe, white gaberdine dress which tapered from wide shoulders to a narrow skirt, the Princess relaxed a little, and greeted Cathy with dry kisses on both cheeks, exclaiming at the pleasure of meeting Monty again.

  They sat at the end of Cathy’s office, around a low, black lacquer table on which the telephone stood behind a small, sweet-scented gardenia bush, a large black ashtray and copies of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. The Princess at once lit a cigarette which Cathy took as an encouraging sign of her nervousness.

  ‘I must apologize,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I’ve nothing to discuss with you in the way of business. This is a personal affair, that’s why we’re both here. I’m sure you can guess what it’s about.’

  The Princess’s tense mask of a face at once blossomed into a smile and she put down the cigarette. ‘You know who I am.’ She looked at the two sisters and tried, as she had tried many times before when one or other of them was with her, not knowing of their relationship, to feel love. Nothing happened. She felt nothing at all.

  ‘We think that you are our mother, our real mother,’ Monty took up the conversation, ignoring the Princess’s stare and the peculiar flat quality of her eyes. They should have been alive with animation, which was what the rest of her tense, mobile body suggested, but they seemed to be opaque, with no light in them. ‘We know that we are the children of a woman my father married in Malaya during the war, whose name was Khatijah binti Ahmad, and we think that you are the same person.’ Monty, too, searched her heart for emotion but found none.

  ‘Yes, I am Khatijah. I am your mother. You have found me at last.’ The words sounded very large now that they had finally been spoken. Monty was suddenly frightened that the older woman was going to embrace her, and she pulled back. The three women looked at each other as if surprised by their own frankness.

  ‘You found us a long time ago, didn’t you? Why didn’t you ever tell us you were our mother?’ Cathy tried to keep the telltale note of concern from her voice. She was touched by the sight of the Princess in a way which she had not anticipated. The spectacle of Ayeshah’s glacial serenity crumbling under the force of her emotions stirred a sense of recognition in her elder daughter.

  ‘I was afraid you would laugh at me, or turn away from me. You were already quite old by the time I came to Europe, you know. Tell me honestly, if a strange half-oriental woman had come to you when you were twelve years old and said she was your mother, what do you think you would have done?’

  She’s trying to play on my prejudices, Cathy realized with a sudden shudder of contempt. As her mother talked, she analysed her features, trying to find herself in the heart-shaped, olive-skinned face and the perfectly painted bow of the mouth. She looked across to Monty, and saw more likeness there, in the straight, broad, catlike nose and the sensual modelling of the face. But, Cathy saw as she crossed her knees under the pleated grey skirt, she herself had her mother’s legs.

  ‘I don’t suppose we would have believed you.’ Monty smiled.

  ‘Even up to now I was never certain that you would want me. That’s why I sent you the pearls. I know how clever you are,’ she smiled at Cathy, ‘and I knew you would soon find me, and put the whole story together. Then it
was up to you, what you wanted to do. But then your father would have done everything he could to prevent it,’ she continued, blowing cigarette smoke fiercely from her pursed lips.

  ‘Did he ever try?’ asked Cathy in the supremely disinterested tone she employed for extracting vital information.

  ‘He told me you would never accept me, that you were proper little English ladies and that I was everything you had been taught to despise.’ The bitter emotion behind her words was unmistakable, but Cathy, with a poignant vision of her father in her mind, was not moved. She led her mother onwards, probing deeper and deeper into her heart.

  By instinct, Monty moved the conversation to the subject of Bettina and confided her own feelings of alienation from the woman she had believed was her mother.

  ‘How I hated that woman,’ Ayeshah almost spat. ‘I used to dream that I would cut off her hands for daring to touch my children. Can you imagine how I wanted to touch you both, all those years?’

  ‘She didn’t like us at all, she almost never touched us,’ Monty remembered sadly. Now, as she said the words, the feelings no longer seemed important. ‘I don’t think our father even noticed us very much until we were old enough to answer him back.’

  ‘Such a waste, such a waste of love.’ Ayeshah looked down, feeling she should weep, but she had no tears.

  Cathy forced herself to pursue the conversation’s predetermined course. ‘When did you contact him after you had made your way to Europe?’

  ‘In 1959. I remember it as if it were yesterday. His face – you could not imagine the expression. He thought he had left me in the mud of the padi field, that he was completely safe, that a little peasant woman could never, ever, follow him across the world to take her revenge.’

  ‘I can imagine he would have been surprised. But what did you ask him for?’