A Final Reckoning

by Susan Moody

  It was as I straightened up that I saw a small gilt-rimmed dish which had been obscured by a box of serving platters. I was very familiar with the plate: it had belonged to my French grandmother and been handed on to Sabine by my mother. Hand-painted flowers decorated the rim; in the centre was an oval of gold leaves surrounding an ornamental letter S. My grandmother’s name was Simone, my mother was called Sylvie. This I could take without the slightest twinge of conscience. I picked it up and went downstairs to the main hall to find David.

  ‘I found this,’ I told him. ‘It was my sister’s.’

  ‘Then of course you must have it,’ he said. ‘It was obviously packed away in error.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s survived all this time. It means such a lot to me.’ I held it to my chest. ‘You can’t imagine how delighted I am to have this back.’

  He smiled benevolently. ‘And I’m delighted for you.’

  Fifteen

  A couple of days later, I came up out of the Tube at Bond Street to see a poster advertising a mixed-media exhibition of contemporary Commonwealth artists at the Hayward Gallery. A pair of complimentary tickets for the same exhibition was sitting on my desk when I reached Chauncey’s, and I could see Lorna raising expectant eyebrows at me as I picked them up.

  ‘Wanna go?’ she called.

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘Actually, darling, I’m not sure it does, but anything to get out of this dump.’

  So in the lunch hour we took a taxi to the Festival Hall site. There was a stream of people going in, and the galleries were full of a jostling crowd.

  ‘I’d no idea there was so much general interest,’ said Lorna. ‘Look, if we get separated, meet up at the front in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Long lunch hour,’ I remarked.

  ‘Don’t know about you, darling, but I look on this as work.’

  ‘There is that.’

  Of course we got separated, Lorna being a much more impatient soul than I am. And then meeting up with a group of three people she knew, pausing to chat while I moved on, taking my time. I passed from a gallery of paintings to another containing sculptures and carvings, bronzes set on plinths in the middle of the room, a large irregular piece of granite incised with an intricate frieze, carved stone plaques on the wall.

  Even from across the room, one piece in particular caught my attention. The exhibition catalogue told me the piece was called ‘Goddess’, but I could think of a name which would have been far more apt. The face was unmistakably that of Clio Palliser; the artist was Paul Ferris, who lived outside Brisbane, Australia and, according to the catalogue, had several other pieces on show at the exhibition.

  I was suddenly hugely excited. Paul Ferris: the man who must have carved the Cronus face, the man who must almost certainly have been the missing art student formerly known as Jarvis. The one with a name that had reminded me of a fairground. Had I finally stumbled on one of the last missing pieces of the Weston Lodge jigsaw puzzle? I made my way to the reception desk, showed them my Chauncey’s business card and asked how I could contact Paul Ferris.

  ‘Well,’ the receptionist, an upbeat woman with a strong Australian accent, said brightly, ‘he’s here in London at the moment, staying with rellies.’ She looked down at my card again. ‘Look, there’s a reception for the artists here this afternoon at three o’clock? Why don’t I issue you with an invitation, then you could catch up with him there?’

  She rootled around in her desk and brought out a deckle-edged invitation. ‘I’m sure we sent at least three to Chauncey’s …’

  ‘Probably snapped up by the big boys,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that always the way?’ She wrote my name and workplace on the invitation-card and handed it over. ‘See you at three. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of the exhibition.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  I went back to the main entrance but there was no sign of Lorna, so I spent the intervening time looking at the stuff on display. In particular, the three other pieces by Paul Ferris. He seemed a little fixated on Greek mythology: there was a Gaia, a Poseidon and a Narcissus, all executed in the same solid style. They reminded me very much of the moai on Easter Island, but given that the two pieces of his work I already knew about were far more contemporary, I was fairly sure that the faces of these gods would prove to be disguised portraits of people in Ferris’s life.

  At fifteen minutes past three, I returned to the entrance but Lorna was still nowhere to be seen. By now, I felt I’d discharged any obligation to her and made my way to the room where already there was the sound of animated conversation. My invitation was accepted without question, and I took a glass of Australian Chardonnay from a tray as I moved further into the room. Almost immediately I heard a familiar guffaw and saw Sir Julian throwing back his head in laughter as he chatted with another of Chauncey’s senior members. And beside them was Lord Forshawe.

  Looking round the room, I could see the advantage of the kind of network to which they clearly belonged, ensuring that on the whole you met like-minded or familiar people and didn’t have to go through the convolutions of meeting new people and having to be pleasant to them before you had a chance to assess whether they were worth being pleasant to. On the other hand, the network to which the rugby-playing friends of Charlie Leeming were attached was exactly the same sort of thing, which made ordinary people like me shudder with revulsion.

  Desmond Forshawe saw me. He smiled delightedly and beckoned me over, at the same time coming to take my arm and lead me towards Sir Julian. I wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good move, but now it was too late.

  ‘A surprise indeed, Mrs Frazer,’ Sir Julian said, lofty as a flagpole, and I know I didn’t imagine the faint touch of frost edging his tone, as though I’d somehow infringed the rules by being here.

  ‘Lucky, really.’ I gave him my most winning smile. ‘I happen to know someone who knows someone …’ I let the sentence trail off, hoping he wouldn’t enquire further.

  He opened his mouth to do precisely that but Forshawe got in first. ‘Your trouble, Julian,’ he boomed, ‘is you hog all the best invitations for yourself. You ought to be letting people like Chantal here attend these occasions as well.’

  Sir Julian’s eyebrows lifted at the use of my first name. ‘Ought I?’ he said.

  Uh-oh … I felt a faint chill of apprehension. How much of a future with Chauncey’s would I have left by the following week?

  ‘Absolutely.’ Forshawe winked at me. ‘Give them a chance to meet the movers and shakers of the art world. After all, they’ll be running it, twenty years down the line, when you and I are drooling in our wheelchairs.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Des,’ said the third man. ‘Personally, I have no plans at all for a wheelchair. Not even a Zimmer frame.’

  ‘Good for you, Francis,’ Sir Julian said. ‘Hoping to achieve immortality by not dying, rather than by the legacy of your work, eh?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I think I should circulate a bit,’ I said. ‘After all, if I’m going to be running the art world twenty years from now, I need to put myself about.’

  They all laughed rather disconcertedly as I wandered off, and I could feel them watching my back. I went over to the man who had taken my ticket at the door and asked if he could point Paul Ferris out to me. He indicated a sixtyish man, not much taller than myself, with a dark grey-tinged beard and a plentiful supply of wild greyish hair.

  I walked over to where he was standing in front of a garish painting of somewhere tropical or South American – it might even have been Easter Island, as there was what looked like a mask on a stick set to the right of the canvas.

  ‘Do you enjoy these dos?’ I asked. ‘Most artists don’t.’

  He brightened at once, a man encountering a kindred spirit. ‘Are you one yourself?’

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ I said. ‘How I wish I were.’

  ‘Have you ever tried? Painting, drawing, sculpting?’

&
nbsp; I shook my head.

  ‘Collage? Ceramics? Textiles? Stained glass.’ He was smiling now, thinking I was a harmless ignoramus. Which to a large extent I was.

  ‘Stained glass?’ I said, a terrier on to a rat. ‘Yes. I saw a most interesting window the other day. It represented a Green Man, I think. Or was it Cronus?’

  A defeated look crossed his face. ‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

  ‘Before I answer, may I ask you something?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘In a previous existence, were you called Jarvis?’

  He hesitated, and I wondered what he thought he might gain by denying it, when the hesitation itself made it self-evident that he must be the art student with whom Clio Palliser had fallen in love, and who had been the father of her two sons.

  ‘My interest is entirely personal,’ I said. ‘I’m not the police, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘What’s there to be afraid of?’ He scowled at me. ‘Yes, I was called Leo Jarvis, a long time ago.’

  ‘And you married Clio Palliser, didn’t you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ He smiled at someone behind me and crooked a finger in greeting.

  ‘How does that work?’

  ‘To marry someone implies a certain degree of willingness,’ he said. ‘In my case, I was bullied first, then bribed, then threatened. Poor Clio was already pregnant by then so I did what I thought was the decent thing and put a ring on her finger. Supplied by her bastard of a father, since I didn’t have a brass razoo to my name.’

  ‘I believe she had a relationship with someone at Oxford.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘She might well have done. I wouldn’t know. I was just the stooge in there to make things look respectable.’

  A couple of people came up to us and excused themselves for interrupting, but could they ask Paul about one of his pieces and was it for sale because they were very interested.

  ‘His work is really compelling, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Look, Paul, can we meet after this, say in the cafeteria across the way?’

  It was hard for him to be rude in front of two prospective customers. He compromised. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said.

  Before I left the room, I made sure there was no rear exit. Then I parked myself with the exhibition catalogue right outside the door. I sensed that Paul Ferris wouldn’t willingly walk across to the Festival Hall to discuss highly personal matters with a complete stranger. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to escape.

  ‘All right …’ I said an hour later as we sat with milky coffees in front of us, while two student musicians played violins nearby. ‘I’m not apportioning any blame here, by the way.’ God: I sounded so headmistressy. ‘So you and Clio got married, to save her reputation. Then she got pregnant again. And then basically you buggered off. Have I got that right?’

  ‘Absolutely right.’ He gave the kind of smile which could only be called rueful. ‘And also absolutely wrong.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Right, we got married. Right, she got pregnant a second time. Right, I left for foreign parts. But the second child was no more mine than the first one. And when I left it was mostly because I couldn’t stand that poor woman’s pain and distress. I simply could not go on living with someone hurting so badly, when there was nothing I could do to help her.’

  ‘She told one of her friends that she didn’t know what happiness meant.’

  ‘That I can well believe. And before you ask, I wasn’t responsible for that.’ Another grimace. ‘Perhaps it was a bit of a cop-out to leave her, but to a certain extent, I felt that I was a victim too.’

  ‘You’re still hung up on her, aren’t you? Your Gaia carving in the exhibition … that’s her, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is indeed. She had – has? – marvellously strong features, no spare flesh on them, you could see the fine bone structure underneath and the way her eyes were set into her face. I’ve used her in several of my pieces.’

  ‘You said you were bullied into marriage.’

  ‘By the father. That evil bastard! I won’t say he had my arm up behind my back as we went to the registry office, but the whole arrangement was entirely up to him, and Clio and I just went along with it, God knows why. He even opened champagne when we got back home, the filthy dipstick. He was a truly revolting person, in every possible way.’

  ‘So these sons of yours …’

  ‘They were not mine, poor little blighters.’

  ‘Oh?’ So Fingal Adair was responsible after all.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Ferris said. ‘If you really must know, the first one was fathered, if that’s the right word, by her loathsome brother Piers. And the second was the result of her own father raping her – yet again. God …’ Ferris’s face was red with remembered, and indeed unforgettable, rage. ‘I only discovered this when I told her I couldn’t stay in this sham marriage any longer, and that it wasn’t fair to her or to her children.’

  ‘Why didn’t she ever say anything?’

  ‘I imagine she was threatened by one or other of them. Or both, for that matter. Like father, like bloody son, if you ask me.’

  ‘What a vile story.’ I began to put together the events I already knew about. Sometime during the Easter vacation, she must have found herself pregnant by her own brother, and rather than let Fingal Adair take the blame, had cut off all relations with him. ‘But why didn’t she have an abortion?’

  ‘God knows. The Pallisers were Catholic, in theory, at least. Maybe it was down to some notion of not wishing to make the sin even worse than it was already?’

  ‘But by that time, she was twenty, twenty-one. Surely she was old enough to tell them to bug off, wasn’t she?’

  ‘In theory, yes. But she said her father threatened her, told her he would do terrible things if she didn’t give in to him. She refused to tell me what they were – probably something to do with the first child – but he was a fearsome man, and I can imagine she was just too frightened to refuse him. And there was probably embarrassment and guilt mixed in there, too. Anyway, by the time I knew anything about it, as I said, there was almost nothing I could do. And even if I’d known right at the beginning, I don’t think I could have persuaded her into an abortion.’

  I shook my head in disbelief at the sheer malevolence that the human mind is capable of.

  ‘Poor, poor girl,’ Ferris continued. ‘I’ll never forget how she cried when she was telling me all this. She kept saying, “They’ve taken everything.” At the time I thought she meant – oh, it’s a longish story, but basically she’d accused Piers of removing some paintings which belonged to her and refusing to hand them back … It was only some years later that I realized she meant much more than that.’

  ‘How pitiful it all sounds.’

  ‘Pitiful?’ He turned his rather fine head away from me and stared into the past. ‘It was bloody appalling. And on top of that, half the people in the area knew or guessed what was going on and not one of them lifted a bloody finger to help her, apart from that bloke who was the tenant farmer or whatever they called it.’

  ‘I think the people at Byfield Hall tried, didn’t they?’

  ‘That was the bossy bitch called … um … Annie Something? Penny? No … Jenny. Yes, I think she tried to get Clio to do something about it, but she wouldn’t. And, believe me, I’m not at all proud of the part I played in it all. The real kicker is that I sometimes wonder whether if I’d handled it differently, those boys might still be alive. But God, I was barely twenty myself. Came from the back-end of Bristol, didn’t have a clue about anything. For all I knew, this was the way the nobs went about things.’ Ferris looked down at the coffee in front of him. ‘Look, I need something stronger than this muck. What say we get a bottle of wine?’

  ‘Or a whisky,’ I said. ‘I’m buying, since I’m the one who’s forced you to go back over all this.’

  ‘Make mine a double. I feel as though I need to disinfect my mouth.’ Ferris
shuddered. ‘That bloody awful man …’

  ‘And you heard about the … the murders, did you?’

  ‘Not at the time. Not until quite a bit later. I went travelling round India and it wasn’t until I got back to Australia that I heard about it from my rellies here in England. What a bloody tragedy it all was.’ He took a long sip of his whisky and looked at me with a sombre expression. ‘Anyway, what’s your interest in all this?’

  I explained about Sabine’s death and Stonor’s feeling that the truth hadn’t come out. ‘Do you think Clio did it?’ I asked bluntly.

  ‘It all seemed so cut and dried that I can’t say I ever questioned it. Especially since … This probably sounds as though I’m being wise after the event, but I …’ He hesitated. ‘Sounds bad, I know, but I have occasionally wondered if it was … well, Clio who killed her brothers.’ He sat back and watched my astonished reaction.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Never more so. She hated them both. And who would blame her? The pair of them had been raping her ever since she was a little girl. Not that I ever met Miles, he was gone long before I came on the scene. He died on a skiing holiday, and I’ve often thought she could easily have suggested they go off-piste and then pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Perfectly possible: she was a really good skier. “Oh, Miles, look at that strange cloud …” or “the light on that mountain …” or even “that weird bird …” then when his attention is focused elsewhere, she could have poked him in the back with her ski stick and watch him slide over the edge. I’m not a skier myself but it could easily be done, I should think.’

  I stared at him in amazement.

  ‘As for that that bloody Piers,’ he continued, ‘the sick bastard was killed in his own flat and the body wasn’t discovered for a week.’

  ‘Why would that be down to Clio?’

  ‘Why not?’ He laughed. ‘You’re looking at me as though I’m off my rocker, but I can assure you that if you’d known any of the Pallisers, you wouldn’t find it at all far-fetched. I’m not saying she did do them, either of them, I’m just saying it wouldn’t surprise me if she had. Because when I checked it out, I discovered that Clio had been up in London the same day they reckoned he died, to do some research at the British Library. So she had motive and opportunity. Which doesn’t make her a murderer, I realize that. And the police didn’t seem to think it was significant. But … and this is the interesting thing … I’m certain I saw some of the very paintings she said Piers had stolen from her. Hanging right there in her study, bold as brass. No attempt at concealment. Real beauts. Scandinavian ones, which her mother had given her.’