One May Smile

by Penny Freedman

  ‘Did James say why he didn’t do that? Apart from the fact that he was supposed to be rehearsing that afternoon?’

  ‘He said that his relationship with Sophie was no longer of such a kind that it would be appropriate for him to take her, and also that he doesn’t have a driving licence.’

  ‘Hah!’ I can’t help laughing, though really this is a miserably stupid business. ‘Well, Conrad never thought of that.’

  ‘So he expected that Asquith would drive the car and be killed or injured.’ He shook his head. ‘What did he think about Sophie, I wonder.’

  ‘Leaning over backwards to be charitable, I’d say that he didn’t really expect that James would take her to the clinic. Conrad loved cars. He couldn’t imagine, I suppose, how anyone could be handed the keys to a beautiful car and not want to drive it right away. Maybe he thought James would just get in the car and drive it around. And if he was just driving in the town he wouldn’t be going that fast and he’d be more likely to be injured than killed.’

  ‘That is a remarkably charitable view, I would say.’

  ‘So would I,’ I admit. ‘It was a stupid, reckless, selfish, wicked thing to do and it seems like an act of Providence that he was the one to get killed. ‘Hoist with his own petard’.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s what happens to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet’s uncle sends them with Hamlet to England, with an order to the English king to kill him. Only Hamlet finds the letter to the king and changes the order so that it’s for R and G to be killed. Hamlet says it’s like the ‘enginer’ being ‘hoist with his own petard’. A petard is a bomb. We’re not talking suicide bombers here, of course, but bombers accidentally blowing themselves up, like IRA bombers used to sometimes.’

  And that seems to be the end of that. Mortensen thanks me and sees us to the door, and we walk away. ‘He’ll still try to pin it on Ray, won’t he?’ I ask David. ‘He’ll never be able to prove Conrad did it and convicting Ray will be better for his clear-up rate.’

  ‘You may be right,’ he says. ‘Shall we go and have some lunch and not talk about it?’

  So we do. We sit outside in the sun and eat seafood with mayonnaise, and I get quite drunk on two glasses of cold white wine and introduce the knotty subject of finding a name for our relationship. ‘Zada last night referred to you as your man,’ I say. ‘I quite like that. It’s simple and true.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make me sound like the butler?’

  ‘Not if I say it right.’

  ‘I don’t think I can call you my woman.’

  ‘Of course you can’t. It sounds as though you drag me around by the hair.’

  ‘So that doesn’t work then, does it?’

  ‘No. Gender asymmetry in titles and descriptors is very interesting. I’ll tell you about it some time.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  ‘As a matter of interest, how do you refer to me usually?’

  ‘Well, if I refer to you at all, I just say Gina. If I’m talking to someone who hasn’t met you, I think I say this woman I know.’

  ‘How poetic. Know in the biblical sense, I presume.’

  ‘I don’t specify.’

  I look at him sitting there trying not to laugh and it occurs to me that I really do love him. ‘I know,’ I say, ‘what I’m going to call you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My beloved. Let me introduce my beloved. I’m seeing my beloved this weekend. Is it all right if I bring my beloved with me? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think I could reciprocate. I couldn’t carry it off.’

  ‘No. I shall have to go on being this woman I know. But I could carry it off, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ he says.

  EPILOGUE

  Lord, we know what we are but we know not what we may be. 4.5

  Annie and I patch things up, as we generally do, and over the next few months she keeps me apprised of developments in the lives of the people with whom we shared those ten strange days. The events themselves become dreamlike and no-one, she says, ever talks about them. I keep my fingers crossed for her and Jon, and work very hard at not thinking he is too good for her. David returns from his secondment in Brighton but we don’t move in together. I refuse to move into his soulless box of a house, convenient for railway station and access to M25, and he refuses to move into my house because he says he would feel like a replacement for the cat (who, aged twenty, mewed her last while I was away, to the distress of the neighbour who was feeding her). I say I don’t know what he means by this and he says I am being deliberately obtuse and so we get nowhere and continue to rattle to and fro between the two in an inconvenient way and frequently have to retrieve stuff we need for work that has ended up in the wrong house. Ellie is expecting a baby just before Christmas and Freda is ecstatic at the prospect of being a big sister. She has some experience of babies, however, and says she will come to stay at my house if the baby is too noisy.

  At work, the Vice-Chancellor has actually run away from me twice: once when I came into the senior common room, where he was drinking coffee and he got up to leave so fast that he knocked his cup over, and once when he saw me approaching across the campus and ducked behind a building to escape. The file on Anastasia has little in it this year, so I imagine she will make it through. The site of the conference centre is protected from public view but the noise engendered dominates our working days.

  As for the others, the first news comes only a couple of weeks after our return and is to be found on the front pages of most of the papers. I read about it in The Guardian, which tells the story straight and without speculation, but then I’m in a position to do my own speculating, aren’t I?

  RESIGNATION DISTURBS HARMONY

  Sir Bruce Asquith, founder of the Harmony Party, has shocked friends and supporters by announcing that he is stepping down from leadership of the party. Even more surprising was the announcement that his twenty-two-year-old son, James, will take over as the party’s leader. James Asquith has a first class Oxford degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies but has no political experience. It is understood that he has abandoned plans to work for a doctorate and will devote himself full time to Harmony.

  Speaking at a fund-raising dinner last night, Sir Bruce said. ‘It has been quite an exhausting business getting the party up and running and I feel now that I owe it to my wife and younger children to spend more time with them. James is extremely able, has a deep understanding of Islamic culture and has had the experience of living in the Middle East when he was of an impressionable age. I have every faith in his leadership of the party, and I am sure that Sophie will be a great support to him.

  James Asquith will marry his girlfriend, Sophie Forrester, ‘in the next few weeks’, it was announced. The couple met as students at Oxford and have known each other for two years. Miss Forrester suffered head injuries when she was attacked in Denmark three weeks ago while taking part in a university production of Hamlet, but is said to have made a good recovery. Conrad Wagner, son of the film mogul, JC Wagner, was taking part in this same ‘jinxed’ production when he was killed in a car accident.

  Speaking to reporters with her fiancé yesterday, Miss Forrester said, ‘Having nearly lost me, I think James wanted to make sure he didn’t lose me again. I know James and his family very well by now and we have no secrets from one another. James can depend on me to support him.’

  The picture that accompanies the story is of James and his father standing rather stiffly together. Sir Bruce is wearing a professional smile but James is looking as if he might rather be somewhere else. He’s going to have to work on that. I notice, when I’m in the supermarket, that most of the other papers go for a more romantic angle, with headlines like Perfect Harmony and pictures of the happy couple. They nearly all have the same picture – James and Sophie leaving last night’s dinner. Sophie is wearing a silky turban of some sort – presumably because her head wound played havoc with h
er hair, but it also suggests a nod to the hijab. She has James’s arm in a fearsome grip and a very determined expression on her face.

  In September, Anders Mortensen lets David know that Ray has been convicted of attempted murder and assault. He was not prosecuted for Conrad’s murder. There is a likelihood that he will serve part of his sentence at least in the UK. The news I get from Annie is altogether more momentous and entertaining. First, in October, she sends me a copy of Hello! This features a double page spread about Brainy Beauty Zada, who is to wed dot com billionaire Duncan Robertson next month. Robertson, I read, at twenty-nine, has already made one dot com fortune and has sold the business to start another one. He is known to shun the limelight and to live modestly, whatever that means in Hello! terms.

  I have never handled a copy of Hello! before and I’m not prepared for the way it socks you on the jaw. There is Zada, airbrushed smile a-dazzle and glossy locks a-tumble, her breasts barely encased in silver and a scarlet-tipped finger wilting under the weight of a vast emerald. Taking a deep breath, I address myself to the column subtitled, I have a thing for shy Scotsmen.

  *

  ‘I love it that Duncan is shy,’ says Zada, speaking at her millionaire father’s London home, ‘and I have a bit of a thing about Scotsmen. As soon as I met Duncan, I knew he was the one, but I knew I was the one who would have to make the running. I was quite shameless, really. I invited him to come on a family cruise on Daddy’s yacht. We got to know each other and here we are, a whirlpool romance, you might say. We found that we both want the same things – lots of children most of all.’ She leans forward and bats those long, dark lashes. ‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ she says. ‘I love babies so much I’m getting one started already.’ She smiles happily. ‘My father will be furious that I’ve told you,’ she says.

  Asked about Robertson’s reputation as a workaholic, she says, ‘Oh he is, completely. But that’s all right. He can bring in the money and I’ll spend it. One thing I did tell him was that I can’t live in the wilds of Scotland. He doesn’t like London but I need to be able to see my family, so we’ve compromised with Sussex – a lovely farmhouse with lots of land, quite near where the McCartneys brought their children up, and they did all right, didn’t they?’

  *

  I send Zada an email to wish her well. Be happy, I write, and she replies Trying to be good. Hope happiness is earned that way. Have given up the ciggies, so that’s a start…

  Not long afterwards, I get another unexpected and unexplored magazine from Annie. This time it’s a movie magazine and on its front cover it carries a picture of a tanned and tidy Adam Barrie. Tyro British Director goes to Hollywood the caption reads, and inside is the story.

  *

  23-year-old Adam Barrie’s only experience as a director is from directing students on stage, but he is set to try his hand as a director for Wagner films. A chance meeting such as student directors can only dream of has led to Barrie being invited to Hollywood, where JC Wagner is said to be keen to improve the cultural image of his movie empire. Barrie is to start work shortly on a new film adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, a dramatic tale of sexual repression and hypocrisy set in the 17th century.

  Barrie, who was a close friend of Wagner’s eldest son, killed in a car crash earlier this year, impressed Wagner with his coolness in a crisis. ‘We could do with some of that stiff upper lip in Hollywood,’ he is reported as saying. Barrie remains cool at the prospect of making his debut as a film director. ‘I always intended to go into straight theatre,’ he told arts correspondents at a press conference yesterday, ‘but this is a great opportunity. There will be technical things for me to learn but if I have a special skill as a director, it’s what I’m able to get out of my actors, and that remains the same whatever medium you’re working in.’

  *

  Finally, in December, Annie sends a copy of The Oxford Mail. On the front page is a picture of some very cold people holding a vigil in Christ Church meadow.

  OUTRAGE AT MEADOW THEATRE PLAN

  A group of over 300 people held a twenty-four hour vigil on Wednesday in freezing temperatures to protest against plans to build a 600-seat theatre in Christ Church meadow. The theatre, intended exclusively for university and college productions, is the brainchild of film magnate, JC Wagner, who wishes to build the theatre as a memorial to his son, who was killed during an OUDS tour earlier this year. Negotiations are at a very early stage but protests are snowballing against the proposal to build on land that has been a playground for undergraduates for hundreds of years. There are fears that in cash-strapped times the university authorities could be tempted by the offer of a very large sum.

  Wagner Pictures’ press office issued the following statement yesterday: ‘Mr Wagner respects the feelings of those who oppose the use of this land for a theatre but he believes that it will be a great amenity for the university, offering student actors the opportunity to learn their craft in a state-of-the-art theatre. He intends The Jacob and Conrad Wagner Theatre as a memorial to his son, who promised to be a fine actor and died before his talent could be realised. It is a tribute from a father to a much-loved son.’