by Jessica Mann
The meeting was degenerating into muddled farce. Watchwomen, frustrated in their hopes of a jolly evening, began to turn nasty. That last questioner was slapped on the cheek by the bulky woman on her right, and hit back with an experienced jab of the elbow. In the front stalls a cosy body in tartan skirt and pearls climbed on to the back of her seat to reach down the feminist Left banner. The cameras, their operators despairing of the advertised programme, were trained on the body of the hall.
‘It might be a football crowd,’ Tamara said, amused and horrified.
The moderator’s face filled the screen. His mouth was an open square, his slicked hair dangled. He shouted that they should stop shouting.
‘Have you got a star on your thigh?’ a high voice yelled, and then the screen went black. Soothing violins were heard on a suitable tape. An announcer apologised for the break in transmission. But Tamara and Noelle could still hear uproar in the Usher Hall.
Tamara half opened the door, and saw a woman in a Feminist Left tee-shirt being half guided, half dragged along. Their eyes met. The woman winked, and jabbed her heel backwards against the knee of one of her captors, and her fist at the mouth of the other.
‘I’ll go without all this aggro,’ she said in a Glasgow accent. ‘Are you Hoyland? Thought so. We have a mutual friend.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Me? Of course I am. I’ve been manhandled by better men than these.’ The two men seized her and moved roughly away.
*
Dame Viola looked every day of her age. Noelle supported her on one side, and the producer, apologising repetitively, on the other. The moderator of the programme paused briefly by the drinks trolley and threw some whisky angrily down his throat. Annie acted as a rearguard, encouraging the security men to hold back the surging crowd. Tamara and Noelle followed Watch women’s President to the back entrance, where a limousine was waiting to take her away.
‘It’s worse than a pop concert. Those women! And they aren’t even young,’ the chauffeur said, disgusted.
‘Is my taxi there?’ the moderator snapped. His goodwill was more important to the producer than that of the most distinguished contributor to her programme, for all the reviews said that Truth or Dare would be nowhere without him. She wondered whether he would tell the programme review board that she was not to blame for the riot. Chattering anxiously, she dropped back to soothe him.
Tamara took her place, holding on to the old woman’s arm. Her lips twitched, the hitherto imperceptible lines around them suddenly deeply incised into the thick camera make-up.
A crowd of outraged Watchwomen, of triumphant feminist lefties, and of photographers, crowded about the stage door. Noelle and Tamara pushed Dame Viola into the car, shielding her with their bodies.
‘You’ll come with me, girls, won’t you?’ Dame Viola said in words she had used before, when she needed independent witnesses to find the body in her cellar. This time, however, they agreed; she was not left to chat up the driver.
‘Drive on please,’ Noelle said. The car pushed the demonstrators gently aside like cattle before a cow-catcher.
‘Well,’ Tamara said, ‘so who was the Stella they mentioned?’
‘Not now,’ Noelle said.
‘Was she your brother’s model?’
‘Yes. Yes. I think so,’ the old woman muttered.
‘The girl with the star on her thigh,’ Tamara murmured.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but do stop it,’ Noelle said. ‘Can’t you see that she’s had enough?’
Tamara opened her shoulder bag. ‘I have a postcard of one of the ‘Stella’ paintings.’ She scrabbled around in the mess. ‘I know it’s somewhere here.’ Spreading her knees to make a lap, she emptied the bag’s contents on to her skirt. ‘Oh, these are Zoe Cory’s chocolates. Are you hungry, Dame Viola?’
Viola Hutber’s eyes fixed on to the purple carton as it emerged from its wrapping paper of naïve puppies and kittens printed in pinks and mauves.
‘Zoe Cory’s?’ she said, her voice husky.
‘Yes. I went to see her today. She’d been sent these sweets but she didn’t seem to want them.’
Dame Viola’s soft fingers hesitated over the box. They were trembling noticeably. ‘I shall take a couple to have later on,’ she said. She picked out the three diamond shaped chocolates with their pleated paper cases. She unclasped her purse to put them inside.
A careless movement of Tamara’s hand upset the box, sending the remaining chocolates to roll on the floor. ‘I’m terribly sorry, how silly of me. Better not have them though. The carpet’s not clean.’
Police were holding back the onlookers in Charlotte Square, where a porter waited with his umbrella open.
Voices shouted through the driving rain. ‘What was all that about? Can Dame Viola answer a few questions? Who’s Stella? Look this way, Vi, just a quick snap.’
‘Let me come up and see that you’re comfortable,’ Noelle said.
‘Perhaps you should cope with them,’ Dame Viola said, indicating the crowd. Tamara went into the hotel, where better mannered but equally curious guests were hovering strategically in the hall.
Dame Viola paused, and looked steadily at Tamara. Tamara gazed back, thinking about the chocolates in that little satin purse. Would Viola Hutber eat them or destroy them?
‘That’s a pretty brooch,’ Tamara said. The white hand moved to touch the ornament.
‘It is my grandmother.’
‘You would have been sorry to lose it.’
‘I . . . yes. Have you been to my house?’
‘You must know I have. And to Maxton; and to Carmell. I was there talking about family history to Lawrence Cory’s wife today.’
Noelle pushed her way towards them. ‘Goodness, they won’t give up. It’s all getting out of hand, we’d better get upstairs to your room before they all come in here.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ the famous, motherly voice said, ‘it’s really all over now.’
‘But—’
‘I shall go up on my own.’
‘Are you sure you will be all right?’ Noelle asked. ‘You look so pale, it’s been a difficult experience.’
‘I can manage, thank you. I should prefer to be alone.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Inquests are not part of Scotland’s legal procedure and no public hearing took place before the Procurator Fiscal certified that he was satisfied as to the cause of Dame Viola Hutber’s death. The chocolates that poisoned her had been traced back through Tamara Hoyland’s hands to Zoe Cory’s; from the Post Office, in Carmell, where they were posted, to the place where they were modified by the injection of a vegetable poison: the Gamekeeper’s Cottage at Whitaker Episcopi.
‘She was getting careless,’ Tamara concluded.
Mr Black agreed. ‘She had come to believe that she was invincible.’
‘Do you think that she would ever have been convicted? Or even tried?’
‘Doubtful. What with circumstantial evidence and the lapse of time . . . I don’t think it would have been risked. There would have been alternatives.’
‘You would have blackmailed her into putting Watchwomen to your purposes?’
Tom Black looked uncharacteristically shifty. After a brief pause he said, rather too energetically. ‘What an idea. Perish the thought.’
Any official thought of revealing that Dame Viola Hutber had commited murders as well as suicide had perished too, and the influence of Watchwomen seemed hardly affected by its charismatic President’s death. Proved to be more than a ‘one-woman-band’, it was as firm a part of the political system as St Uny’s School seemed to be of the educational one. For the revelation of Basil Hutber as the later incarnation of the scandalous Rex had so far had no effect on the school’s reputation at all.
At the inquest no suggestion of murder was heard. The pathologist had changed his mind and testified that the old man could have suffocated himself on his non-regulation pillo
w. Lawrence sat impassively in the public gallery, surrounded by far from impassive citizens who knew that the police had suspected him of murder, and heard the deputy coroner return a verdict of accidental death.
There may have been no crime, but everyone knew there was a motive and Lawrence made no secret of it. He was heard to address Rainsford as ‘Uncle’. He registered his interest in the St Uny estate with a legal charge. He gave an interview to a national journalist on the subject of the extinction of the stigma of illegitimacy.
Rainsford Hutber had expected that public reaction would force what Lawrence intended to prevent, the closure of the school. If he’d been an ordinary parent he would have withdrawn his own son, he said. But the parents were influenced by those nebulous, inexplicable forces that form the consensus of public opinion. Basil Hutber, and Viola, it seemed, were proof that dissipated youth can precede useful and distinguished careers.
As Mr Black told Tamara, ‘the British do love their reformed rakes.’ Viola should have made a public recantation, boasting of her degraded childhood. Even more adherents would have flocked to her cause.
Tamara had been sent an invitation to the Speech Day by Zoe Cory; Mr Black, who was curious to see the survivors, produced a godson’s son in the second year at the school. My old friend Dick’s grandson. Piers, I think he’s called. He failed Eton entrance.’
Tom Black and Tamara Hoyland were not the only guests with unusual motives for sitting through a speech day. So many invitations had been accepted that the chapel would not hold everyone, and a marquee had been erected in the quadrangle. Properly dressed ladies and gentlemen queued to get in, conversing in loud, self-confident voices.
When Basil Hutber’s past was mentioned, it was with admiration.
‘A lot of money in art. Clever fellow.’
‘Sad about his sister.’
‘I must have a word with Mrs Cory about Mark’s teeth.’ The headmaster’s wife seemed to be held responsible for the health, happiness and lost laundry of every St Uny’s mother’s son.
‘Suicide . . . you can’t wonder that the balance of her mind was disturbed.’
‘Second in the over-fifteens.’
‘Those feminist lefties should be flogged.’
‘One of those character building trips, with rock-climbing.’
‘Harpies, I call them.’
It was a very English scene; flushed faces, unexpected hats, a comfortable expectation of tea and little iced buns. Wars, taxation, scandals and suicides seemed powerless to affect the immutable customs of the middle classes.
The programme of a speech day was equally unchangeable. There would be speeches, prize-giving, swimming sports and a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
On the platform the performers faced an indulgent audience. George Jenkin was in charge of a table loaded with silver cups and prize books. The Bishop was ready to pronounce a blessing. The Chairman of the newly constituted Board of Governors, Rainsford Hutber, sat beside his wife, who wore a navy blue dress, hat, shoes and gloves. Their slight gloom was thought very proper, less than a year since his father’s death.
The headmaster wore full academic dress. His wife, heavily pregnant, had let her hair grow and wore a dress and hat designed to fix attention above the bulge. Even though the Stacey Stewart series had recently been repeated, and the early photographs of Zoe Meredith reprinted, there seemed no likeness between that girl and this.
The list of speeches was long. The Chairman’s report, the headmaster’s account of the academic year, the names of the prizewinners, were to be preceded by a few words from the Mayor of Carmell. He wore his velvet and ermine, and was weighed down with chains of office. He sweated profusely. He embarrassed his audience by promising to mention nothing embarrassing.
‘He might as well have flashed up one of Rex’s nudes,’ Tamara whispered and was hushed by her neighbours.
‘Instead,’ the Mayor said, ‘I shall repeat our welcome to Carmell’s new citizens: the headmaster of this distinguished old school, recently elected to the Council over which I have the honour to preside. And to his illustrious wife.’
‘You did say that the British love reformed rakes,’ Tamara said, and, his voice concealed by the polite applause, Tom Black replied, ‘It’s the good old principle of the prodigal son.’
The Mayor spoke of national recognition; of demanding commitments; of worthy causes and the glory that would be shed upon Carmell. This gathering was the first to be told what would be announced that very day.
The newly elected President of Watchwomen was to be Zoe Cory, the headmaster’s wife.
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