The Herring Seller's Apprentice

by L. C. Tyler

  I had known Rupert well during his own golden-youth epoch. We had read the same subject at the same college. We were not inseparable – indeed I now realize that, in a strange way, we were scarcely even friends. But he chose, for reasons of his own, to spend a great deal of time in my company.

  He was tall, blond, aristocratic and improbably good-looking. I was tall. There was no situation, no society, no geographical location in which Rupert looked anything other than at home and at ease. I rarely felt at home anywhere – least of all when I actually was at home. Perhaps he felt my ordinariness acted as a counterpoint to his own charm and beauty. If so, it would never have occurred to him not to use this fact to his advantage, nor would it have occurred to him that he needed to offer anything in return. I remember one occasion, when we were together in a restaurant, I had thanked the waiter for some small service – possibly fetching me a clean knife or filling my glass with water. ‘You don’t need to thank him all the time in that disgustingly servile manner,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s his job, Ethelred. It’s what he’s for.’ Amusing Rupert, providing him with alcohol, making him look or feel better – these were simply the things that I was for.

  The first time I met Rupert could, I suppose, have been at the principal’s sherry party for freshers at the beginning of Michaelmas term; but large gatherings at which he was not the centre of attention were not conditions under which Rupert considered that he could be appreciated at his best. I do not remember his being at the party and quite possibly, contrary to all custom and precedent, he chose not to go. What I do recall very clearly is a day or two later, when he arrived unbidden at my rooms at college and, with only the briefest of introductions, draped himself instinctively in the only chair without broken springs and announced, ‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now. I don’t mind what it is, as long as it’s the best. If you don’t know what’s the best, just give me the most expensive.’ I had been trying to write an essay, did not want company and had little enough money to buy my own alcohol, let alone other people’s. That evening Rupert got through half a bottle of malt whisky before leaving unsteadily, but just as abruptly as he had arrived. I later found that he had been sick on the staircase as he departed, something for which my scout blamed (and never quite forgave) my immediate neighbour.

  ‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now.’ It was a very Rupert phrase. So was, ‘It’s been such a pleasure to see me.’ Some people – the majority of people, I think – found Rupert intensely irritating, but others could not resist succumbing to his peculiar charm. I couldn’t. Later, in a much more comprehensive manner, nor could my wife.

  There was a theory, amongst the girls in our year, that Rupert was homosexual. When I pointed out that he had innumerable girlfriends, they merely gave each other knowing glances and said, ‘Exactly.’ I had no girlfriends, but nobody felt the need to attribute this to my sexuality.

  Geraldine first entered my life as one of Rupert’s transitory companions. She was two or three years younger than we were and was, at the time, at one of the secretarial colleges that flourished as a sort of distant penumbra of the university. In some ways she was Rupert’s perfect counterpart – a lively blonde with almost perfect legs, a seductive smile and eyes that sparkled with a constant mischief. She anticipated by some years the fashion for dressing in black that, much later, everyone seemed to adopt. I am not suggesting that she was in any way fashion-conscious, still less a leader of fashion. Indeed, she usually dressed very simply in a sweater or polo-neck and a skirt just short enough to display her black-stockinged legs to the best possible advantage. But black suited her and she knew that it suited her.

  I met her from time to time, in Rupert’s room or punting on the Cherwell or at parties; then she was replaced, with no warning at all, by Victoria or Amanda or Kate or somebody. After university, Rupert and I worked in different parts of London. Victoria or Amanda or Kate was replaced by Elizabeth, a pleasant, sensible, but wholly unremarkable girl who was training to be a nurse and who seemed unlikely to hold Rupert’s interest for long. If I thought of Geraldine at all it was only in the context of a tenner that she had borrowed from me and clearly never intended to return. In due course, Rupert married the sensible Elizabeth. I was only mildly hurt at not being asked to be best man.

  It was some time after that that Geraldine reappeared, not to repay my tenner, either immediately or at any stage in the future, but to invite me to a dinner party. She made some polite chit-chat about my last book (I was a proper writer by then – not just a biographer of penguins) before, apparently as an afterthought, asking whether I could let her have Rupert and What’s-her-name’s new address. At dinner (there were about a dozen of us squeezed into her small flat) Rupert was seated next to Geraldine. Elizabeth and I were at the far end of the room; Geraldine scarcely exchanged more than a dozen words with either of us all evening. But she then surprised me by phoning up the following day and suggesting a trip down to Kent – with Rupert and What’s-her-name if they could be persuaded to come. Could I speak to Rupert? I spoke to Rupert, who immediately said that he rather thought they were free that weekend. His enthusiastic response struck me as odd at the time, though not of course with hindsight.

  If I said that Geraldine married me to get closer to Rupert it is unlikely you would believe me, but later I was never able to come up with any better reason. The only really solid argument against this theory is that Geraldine never thought far enough ahead for that type of long-term planning. Of course, it is possible that she saw in me something that I was never able to see in myself – at least for a while. But, if so, I still have no idea what that thing could have been and sometimes wish that she had told me. The knowledge might have helped me in the bleak years that followed.

  Elizabeth later told me that she had been onto Geraldine’s game from the very beginning, though, that being the case, it is difficult to see why she then allowed Geraldine to steal her husband quite as easily as she did. As for me, I was not onto Geraldine’s game until the day she walked out, leaving me a brief note propped against the salt cellar on the kitchen table. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ asked Rupert. He made a nervous attempt at the old Rupert smile. ‘I should have phoned you first, I suppose, but I wasn’t sure that you would agree to see me. It’s rather important, you see.’

  Once inside, Rupert stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, nervously rubbing his hands together, the half-smile now rigid and fixed. He seemed somehow smaller than when we had last met. The once-perfect skin was perfect no more; there were lines round the mouth and the eyes. The fair hair was just a bit too long and was noticeably thinning. His manner, once languid and urbane, now seemed merely vague. I could see, for the first time, why Elsie might choose to describe him as ‘chinless’. Above all, he looked old and tired.

  ‘I suppose I couldn’t ask you for a drink, dear boy?’

  ‘I take it somebody usually gives you a drink round about now?’

  For the first time he grinned properly, acknowledging this throwback to our earlier days.

  ‘Whisky?’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps a small one if it’s not too much trouble. Do you mind if I sit here?’ He paused awkwardly, waiting for me to confirm that my hospitality extended to seating.

  I offered him the most comfortable chair and fetched him a large malt whisky. I could at least (just) afford it these days, and I no longer had any reason to bear him ill will. Even at the time of the divorce I suppose that it was Elizabeth, and for some reason Elsie, who had taken such exception to his role in the break-up of two marriages. Now, some ten years on and deserted by Geraldine in his turn, Rupert was not somebody that I could hate, much though this weakness might lower me in Elsie’s estimation.

  ‘This is very awkward,’ he began. ‘Very awkward indeed.’ He toyed with the heavy cut-glass tumbler, a piece of flotsam (as it happened) that I had rescued from the wreck of my marriage. He swilled the whisky first one way and then, in an exp
erimental fashion, the other. It seemed there were only two ways to swill whisky, so he was forced to come to the point. ‘You know that Geraldine has done a runner?’

  I didn’t want to talk about this to Rupert, but I realized that, for all sorts of reasons, I had no choice. If I had had the foresight to pour myself a drink I also could have done the swilling thing, but I just said, ‘That’s what Elsie thinks. The police on the other hand seem to think it’s suicide. Money problems possibly.’

  ‘But that’s not like Geraldine, is it?’ he said with a nervous quickness that would have been quite untypical of the old Rupert. He frowned as though he was trying to make sense of it all. ‘People like Geraldine go around screwing everyone else up. It’s like water off a duck’s back to them. Even if she had money problems, that wouldn’t have made her kill herself.’

  ‘Anything, anything at all, could be like Geraldine. You never could tell what she would do next.’

  Rupert nodded, but with a far-away look in his eyes. ‘Do you know what I thought – when I first heard that she had vanished and left that odd note? I thought – Elizabeth has bumped her off and faked a suicide to cover up. She was always threatening to murder Geraldine in the old days.’

  ‘Surely not?’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so now.’ Rupert ran his fingers quickly through his hair. ‘It’s a long time since she sent Geraldine a really specific death threat. I mean, place, time, order in which bits were to be cut off with a chain-saw. In any case, she’d have less cause to do anything now – with me and Geraldine no longer together. You know we split up, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded again. Unlike Elsie, he did not seem curious about how I knew.

  ‘But then,’ he continued, ‘Elizabeth remarried and moved to Essex or somewhere dreadful like that. Why does anyone live in Essex? She’s got kids now. Elizabeth wouldn’t have done it. But it isn’t suicide either. That means Geraldine is alive somewhere. We have to find her, Ethelred.’

  ‘We?’

  Rupert tossed back the last of his whisky. ‘OK, point taken. Not your problem any more. It shouldn’t be mine now that we’re no longer … well, you know … but there was some unfinished business that meant we had to stay in touch, like it or not.’

  He looked at me and then suddenly changed tack: ‘Look, I’m sorry about this. It was wrong of me to come. I could understand if you still hated my guts, old boy.’

  I said nothing, but replenished his glass.

  ‘I would if I were in your shoes – hate me, I mean,’ Rupert blundered on. ‘I went off with your wife, you know.’

  So, there it was: yet another unnecessary reminder about my private life. Though my memory is becoming worse in middle age it was unlikely, on the face of it, that I would have forgotten my best friend going off with my wife.

  ‘You went off with the only woman I ever loved, if you don’t count my primary schoolteacher,’ I said. ‘She may possibly be the only woman who ever loved me. Apart from my mother, I suppose, though she was sometimes rather vague on that score.’

  ‘Only woman who ever loved you? That’s worse,’ said Rupert. He shook his head slowly.

  I knew Rupert and I knew whisky. In spite of long years of training, he did not have the strongest of constitutions for alcohol. The first glass was making contact with his bloodstream. Soon he would be feeling very sorry for himself. Another couple of glasses and he could be crying on my shoulder. If I let him stay that long and gave him that much whisky. But I planned to do neither.

  ‘It’s much worse,’ he said again, as if it was important that he should persuade me of the justice of his earlier remark. He jabbed a finger in my direction to emphasize a point that really required no emphasis at all. ‘I’m a shit. If I were you, I’d be sitting there thinking “bastard”.’ He brushed back a thin but wayward lock of blond hair that had flopped into his eyes.

  I was in fact thinking ‘poor bastard’, but I did not say so. I was also wondering whether he could afford a haircut these days. But I didn’t say that either. ‘Since you’re not me,’ I observed, ‘you can’t tell what I should be feeling. Unlike Elizabeth, I never sent any death threats, did I?’

  ‘Very decent of you, old man. Very white, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  Very white. I often wondered where Rupert found some of his phrases. Many were facetious affectations that he had picked up in his teens or twenties and seemed to have been unable to drop. But, even in that distant past that constitutes my teens, nobody our age said ‘very white of you’ or ‘old boy’ – except just possibly in the patrician circles from which Rupert seemed to come.

  ‘But perhaps not white enough to spend time looking for Geraldine,’ I observed, with only slightly too much emphasis on the word ‘white’. I could afford just a little mockery and he would have no choice but to put up with it.

  ‘Let me at least tell you why I’ve got to find her,’ said Rupert, staring at a spot on the carpet about five feet in front of him.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You know how Geraldine was always coming up with hare-brained schemes,’ he said. ‘Well, just before we split up she devised one of her very best. She’d got wind of plans for a new tube line in the East End. She was going to buy property in Hackney, do it up and sell it on when the new tube line was announced and prices rose.’

  ‘And they didn’t?’

  ‘No, they’re going up, I suppose – everything in bloody London is and everybody’s making money out of it except me. It’s just that there never was much evidence of any property buying on Geraldine’s part. Once or twice I pointed out that she had the money and we were about to miss the boat, not to mention the expenses she was running up, but she said that she still needed to raise more dosh.’

  ‘Very inconvenient for her.’

  ‘Not for her. You know Geraldine. It was my money that she was playing with. Probably other people’s too. I think her sister invested as well.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I don’t know about other people, but it was two hundred thousand of mine. Every penny that I had, and then some. Strangely, when we split up, my first reaction wasn’t to demand my money back – in fact, I was afraid she might cut me out of the deal. The doubts started later.’

  ‘But she can’t have made much of a loss if she didn’t buy anything. You must be able to get most of it back.’

  ‘Only if I can find Geraldine. If she’s done a runner, she’s done it with my cash.’

  Two hundred thousand pounds would have been a great deal of money to me, but then I’m just a poor writer. I tried to recall what Rupert now did. I seemed to remember that he was a fund-raising consultant, which might bring in a great deal or nothing at all. Looking at him, I suspected that nothing at all was closest to the mark and that the loss of that sort of money (could he have inherited it?) mattered very much indeed. And he was relying on me, it seemed. Under the circumstances, things did not look too good for Rupert.

  ‘I don’t think I can help,’ I said abruptly. ‘I really have no idea where she is.’

  ‘Shit. I was sure, for some reason, that you would.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was just …’ He paused and gave me what I can only describe as a funny look. ‘I just thought you might know. You see …’ There was another pause as though he had been about to confide something to me but had suddenly changed his mind. ‘Sorry, it was just a silly idea I had.’

  ‘Very silly,’ I concurred.

  The last remaining fragment of Rupert’s backbone seemed to collapse. His head sagged forward and for a moment I thought that he was about to burst into tears. But he merely gave a deep sigh and straightened himself up again.

  ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘you can never say “no” to her. She gets into your system, and once she’s there you can never quite shake her off – a bit like malaria. Look, you’ve even still got her photograph over there on that table.’

  We both turned and looke
d at the slightly faded snap of a still-young Geraldine with her blue eyes, short blonde hair and a smile of the purest wickedness. When had I taken that? On the trip to Kent, when I still scarcely knew her, but was already in the process of losing her?

  ‘I would have thought that a crime writer like you would have been dying to investigate a problem like this,’ said Rupert, who clearly shared at least one of Elsie’s delusions.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is a popular misconception that crime writers have the first idea how to solve a real case. Most police sergeants can’t write best-sellers either. This is one of the many times when things are best left to the professionals. I am a writer and that is all I am.’

  ‘Geraldine reckoned that you only lived for your writing. She had a nickname for you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘The Herring Seller. It was a facetious reference to the red herrings that she considered my stock in trade. I never found the name quite as amusing as she evidently did.’

  ‘She never did consider other people’s feelings that much,’ said Rupert wistfully.

  From her photo frame Geraldine grinned at us out of the past, daring us to wonder what was going on in her mind.

  It must have been around ten o’clock when Rupert finally accepted that I was going to do nothing for him and left, which in turn would mean that it was about quarter past ten when the telephone rang.

  ‘Is that double-dealing bitch with you?’

  It might have been more charitable to at least ask who the caller was referring to, but I just said, ‘No, Geraldine isn’t here.’

  ‘Well, when she does show up, just say that all this clothes-on-the-beach business doesn’t fool me for a moment. I want my money back, and I want it now.’

  ‘I see …’ I began, but the caller had already hung up, leaving me to try to identify her voice. Of course, Charlotte, Geraldine’s sister and erstwhile business partner. She had clearly fared no better than Rupert. I could only speculate how much she had been persuaded to part with. Charlotte was nobody’s fool, but she would resent the deception that much more in consequence.