by Alan Beechey
“Nice one, Olls,” Eric said, nudging Oliver and indicating Effie with a sideways nod of his head. “Like the hair.”
Oliver smiled politely, wishing he had Wendy Bennet’s talent for signaling utter contempt at the same time. Eric Mormal (Tesco, black cotton) was an old school friend of Toby’s, a lean, pale specter, who looked like a stretched thirteen-year-old, complete with residual acne, a pubic moustache, and a mind permanently in the gutter—not so much for the filth to be found there, but because it was the best place to metaphorically look up women’s skirts. He worked for a nearby cooperative farm, but his bliss was to become a full-time rock legend as evidenced by spiky dyed-blond hair, tattoos, and a collection of hoops in his ear that made it look like a shower curtain.
“So who are you fronting now?” Oliver asked, trying to remember what Toby had last told him about Mormal’s musical career. “Is it still The Gong Farmers?”
“Nah, we have a new lineup now: we’re called ‘Mrs. Slocombe’s Pussy.’” He tried to toss a stuffed olive into his mouth, without success. It rolled under a sofa.
What was Mormal doing here? Oliver wondered. For girls of the Bennets’ micro-class—Orwell would have stuck them in the lower-upper-middle bracket—the provincial dinner party was still the primary lek, the gentrified equivalent of the singles bar. No doubt it was at some similar, very soft society event that the Honorable Donald had been strutting his well-tailored but fraying plumage when Lucinda, scenting an aristo, had wafted a few choice pheromones in his direction; thus the Hon. Don was undone. But Eric Mormal was the barrel’s scrapings, the living reason why “uncouth” has no antonym. Surely Wendy wasn’t this desperate?
Ben had been invited to squeeze onto an unyielding settee between the Bennets’ only twins, Clarissa and Catriona (both loose blonde curls, yellow Lanvin and blue LaCroix, respectively) and was asking them politely where he might have seen them before when a young woman in an ill-fitting housemaid’s uniform belted a gong beside the fireplace, a fearful summons to the dining room. He got up gratefully from his Bennet sandwich, and the two girls followed silently in his wake.
The customary separation of couples at the dining table didn’t seem to apply to Lucinda and the Honorable Donald, presumably so that if the urge to propose came over him during the meal, he could skip the legwork and drop to one knee straight from his chair. Effie, however, was squashed between Quilt-Hogg on her right and Mormal on her left, while Oliver was consigned to the other side of the table. He had squeezed her elbow reassuringly as they entered the dining room. “Just signal if I start to drink the finger-bowl,” she had whispered, nervously scanning the ranks of silverware that bordered her tablemat.
“Did you meet Oliver up at Oxford, Effie?” Xanthe Bennet (blond chin-length hair, gray Chanel) ventured from across the table, after they had taken their seats.
“No, but I met him in Oxford, once,” said Effie with a smile, and immediately watched her witticism sail effortlessly over Xanthe’s head. She’d noticed that, among the bling, each girl was wearing a diamond-encrusted pin with the initial of her first name. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Xanthe thought it her entire signature.
“So where did you go to college?” Davina now demanded, clearly the chief hostess in her mother’s absence.
“Just Hendon.”
“Is there a University of Hendon? We don’t know it.”
“It’s the police training establishment, the Peel Centre,” Effie explained, as a dish of strangely soapy consommé arrived in front of her. Spoon, she thought.
“So what are you?” asked Xanthe, “a Scotland Yard superintendent, like Oliver’s uncle?”
“Just a sergeant for now.”
“Hey, Olls,” called Mormal, between noisy inhalations of the soup, “do you make Effie keep her uniform on? It’s the black stockings, innit?”
“Effie’s my uncle’s principal assistant,” Oliver explained, hoping his pride in his girlfriend would cheer her a little. He knew that her role as a guest would keep the Strongitharm Look in check, much as he longed to see Mormal zapped by it. “That means she’s a plain-clothes officer.”
“How appropriate,” murmured Davina with a private smile. Effie eviscerated a dinner roll.
“Well, Effie,” said Mormal, patting her on the shoulder, “you can feel my collar any time. And not just my collar, if you know what I mean,” he added, winking at Oliver across the table.
“Tragically, I do,” Effie muttered, but Mormal wasn’t listening. He had jumped to his feet, holding his soup spoon as if it were a microphone.
“And now a little recitation entitled ‘She was only the policeman’s daughter, but she let the chief inspector…’”
Once again, all the sisters dissolved into indulgent laughter.
“Oh, Eric,” chortled Catriona, “you’re so leisure.”
Mormal subsided into his chair at an angle that would let him glimpse down Effie’s neckline each time she took a sip of consommé, which, like Mormal, was thick and unwholesome.
“Oliver, what’s this we hear about you stumbling over bodies again?” Xanthe demanded. “We’ve been literally dying to ask you.”
“My uncle and I found Dennis Breedlove’s body last night,” Oliver confirmed. He wanted to learn more about the old man’s life, in the hope that it would provide a path to the blackmailer, but this gossipy crowd was surely not the forum.
“Yeah, the word is he hanged himself from the old Synne Oak,” Mormal said.
“That’s what it looks like.”
Mormal smiled. “Got any gory details?”
Davina glared at him fiercely across the table. “Eric, I don’t think this is an appropriate subject for a supper party,” she said. Her younger sisters let loose little sighs of disappointment.
“I agree,” said Toby, who had clearly been told of the death since he had fled the Swithins’ home that afternoon. “It’s very sad. I liked Mr. Breedlove a lot. I used to visit him. He was always up for a chat about my research.”
He seemed to tear up. Oliver noticed Mormal and Davina catch each other’s eye again, this time with a faint hint of amusement. He guessed it was some private mockery of Toby’s sentiments, a shared cynicism momentarily spanning the class chasm between them, scorning what they saw as unmanly grief, and he despised them for it.
“He seemed such a cheerful little chap,” said Catriona. “One felt one could tell him anything. Do you know what drove him to end his life, Oliver?”
Oliver looked at Effie for guidance. She shrugged.
“The police think it was because he’d received a blackmail letter,” he said.
“He was being blackmailed?” Mormal exclaimed. “What on earth for?”
“I can’t imagine.” Not here, anyway, Oliver added silently. Davina’s eyes stayed on Oliver, across the table.
“Perhaps he couldn’t afford to pay,” suggested Ben. “And so he knew he would inevitably be exposed.”
“Exposed,” repeated Mormal, as if he were genetically required to report every potential double entendre.
“Exposed,” echoed Quilt-Hogg. He pointed at Ben. “It’s funny, because he’s a photographer,” he explained to Lucinda.
“Please,” said Davina firmly, “I insist that we change the subject.” She sat back as a stuffed artichoke was deposited in her place by the stoic housemaid.
“Oh, Davvy, this is literally the most hair-raising thing that’s happened for yonks,” Xanthe protested. “All right, we’ll respect the late Mr. Breedlove. But let’s play a guessing game. What’s the one thing that would make each of us commit suicide?”
“I know what would do it for Davina,” giggled Catriona. “Being caught with a single hair out of place.” She turned to her eldest sister. “Honestly, Davvy, you’re so vain. I think if you ever got a run in your tights, you’d shrivel up with humiliation.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” said Davina.
“Exaggeration? You even secretly ironed your underwear this afternoon!” said Catriona.
“Why did she do that?” asked Clarissa.
“I think it was because Oliver was coming to dinner,” claimed Catriona, with a sly glance at Effie, who felt freshly conscious that her dress had traveled to Synne rolled up in a duffel bag. Oliver, momentarily relieved that the ghastly conversation had drifted from Uncle Dennis toward sisterly teasing, felt the dread return.
“That’s astounding,” said Clarissa.
“That she was ironing her underwear?”
“No, that Davvy knows how to use an iron.”
“She clearly doesn’t, because she burned herself. That’s how I found out.”
Davina glanced ruefully at the pink stripe on the edge of her hand, but Oliver noticed that the move was calculated to show off her golden wristwatch. A Cartier Tank Americaine. Money.
“You’re afraid of being baffled, Davina,” said Toby genially. “In the Shakespearean sense, that is. In his time, ‘baffled’ meant publicly embarrassed.”
“Really?” replied Davina. “Then I’d have something in common with dear Effie. I hear the police are often baffled.”
Effie glared down at her artichoke and took another mouthful of wine.
“Toby, why don’t you tell the ladies about the dig you’re working on in Stratford,” Oliver cut in swiftly.
“Oh, is that part of your research?” Ben asked.
Toby looked at Mormal. “No, it’s just an excuse to spend a few weeks in Shakespeare Central, soaking up the atmosphere. There’s a small island next to the downstream weir on the Avon. An old Victorian house on it is being demolished. It’s standard practice to sift through the dirt whenever there’s any rebuilding in the Stratford area, just in case. So a bunch of us from my college agreed to do it, and Eric volunteered to help us in his spare time. But we don’t expect to find anything from Shakespeare’s time—we’re well south of the seventeenth-century part of town and on the opposite side of the river.”
“Then what is this research of yours, Toby?” asked Davina. “Educate us.”
“It’s about the true identity of William Shakespeare. You probably know that many people think Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. That the author was really Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or even Christopher Marlowe, whose murder in 1593 must have been faked. What’s provoked these theories is our incredulity that the son of a provincial glover—or butcher, according to some sources—with no university education could write dramas that require an intimate knowledge of court intrigue, the law, foreign explorations, Roman history, and so on.”
“So you’ve found yet another candidate?” asked Ben. “Queen Elizabeth the First with no wig and a false moustache? Or is it really that infinite number of monkeys?”
Toby laughed. “No, I believe that the plays were written by William Shakespeare, all right. But this is the odd part. When you look at the very few surviving facts about Shakespeare, the London actor-playwright, and Shakespeare, the Stratford-upon-Avon landowner and businessman, there’s no overlap.”
“Perhaps he was Ernest in the town and Jack in the country,” Oliver said, unable to decide which way his artichoke more resembled a pinecone, in appearance or in taste.
“Ernest and Jack Worthing turned out to be same person. My belief is that Stratford Will and London Will were two different people.”
“Because of this lack of evidence?” asked Effie.
“The scanty documentation isn’t so unusual in itself. We don’t know much about the personal lives of any dramatists of that period. So most research is like Kim’s Game. We have to ask what’s missing that we’d truly expect to see: the ‘pregnant negative.’ And what we don’t have is a single piece of paper written or signed by Stratford Will that lays claim to his being the great London poet and playwright. For example, Stratford Will’s notorious last will and testament—the one that leaves his wife the ‘second-best bed’—doesn’t mention his part ownership in any South Bank theaters. In fact, it doesn’t mention any manuscripts or books or unfinished plays or other papers. No, I think London Will is a different William Shakespeare, from somewhere other than Stratford.”
The housemaid slipped into the room and began to replace the remains of the artichoke with plates of gray roast beef.
“But just a tick,” Catriona protested. “What about Stratford Will’s tomb? We were taken there on a school trip once. There’s that statue on the church wall that looks just like all those photographs of London Will.”
“Aha, that’s where history got sidetracked, Cat,” Toby remarked, helping himself to overcooked vegetables. “I think that sometime after Stratford Will died in 1616, somebody spotted that he had the same name as a famous London playwright, who may well have died three or four years earlier, going by the dates of his last plays. And thus, with a little jiggery-pokery, the Stratford Shakespeare industry was born, hijacking London Will’s fame. Ka-ching!”
“And so we never found the real London Will…” Oliver ventured.
“…because we never knew we had to look for him.”
“How deep you are!” said Catriona, leaning across the table and gazing intently into Toby’s dark, nervous eyes, which took on an expression of mild panic. Clarissa, beside him, who had tuned out of the conversation five minutes earlier and was wondering instead why Catriona was wearing her own initial pin, took her cue to drop her hand onto Toby’s forearm.
“Well, Toby,” Davina intervened with a yawn, “it all sounds very brainy, but I’m sure I speak for Effie when I say let’s move on to a less taxing subject.”
“Then I suppose it’s my turn to tell you what I’m working on,” Oliver said quickly, observing Effie for signs of an impending Look. He thought about announcing his next planned story in the Railway Mice series, The Railway Mice and the Frog of the Baskervilles, but then it occurred to him to try out his idea for the book of common knowledge (which wasn’t a bad title, come to think of it). It took several goes to make the Bennets understand he was not talking about regular trivia, known only to cognoscenti, such as that the banana plant is technically a herb, not a tree; nor indeed about obvious information concerning the banana’s color, its taste, or (as Mormal persisted in mentioning) its suggestive shape—every fool can tell that. But the banana’s reputation as a source of potassium is perfect paradigm of…what should he call it?
“Let me think of another example,” he said. He fixed his eyes on Mormal and inspiration came. “What’s the first odd fact that comes to mind when I say the word ‘cockroach’?”
“Cockroaches will be the only survivors of a nuclear war,” said Toby instantly. Oliver nodded.
“Most people have heard that, although there doesn’t seem to be an atom of truth in it. But, as I’m finding, fact is nowhere near as appealing, or as memorable, as some fictions.”
“Effie, you’re very quiet,” interrupted Davina. “I suppose you’re used to that, with such an intelligent boyfriend. Let’s tempt you into the conversation. Were you at Royal Ascot this year?”
“Not this year, no,” Effie replied sweetly, as she stabbed a soggy Brussels sprout. “And before you ask, you patronizing bitch, not at Henley, or Cowes Week, or the Chelsea frigging Flower Show or any other stopping-off place in the London Season where you inbred oxygen-thieves get a last chance to squander your ill-gotten wealth before the revolution comes and you’re all dangling from the lampposts,” she added mentally.
“I say,” Quilt-Hogg cut in. “Nuclear war—atom of truth. That’s jolly good.” He chuckled. Lucinda squeezed his hand reassuringly.
The table started to split into smaller conversational clusters, and Effie discovered that if she looked busy with her food, smiled occasionally at nothing
in particular, and kept her eyes fixed on the cruet, she could exclude herself from any subgroup that included a Bennet. Apart from a brief exchange with Eric Mormal, who asked her if the “eff” in “Effie” was short for what he thought it was—it wasn’t—she managed to get all the way to dessert in splendid isolation. Only Oliver, out of reach, noticed.
“Do you ski?” Quilt-Hogg asked suddenly. Effie turned and realized the question was for her.
“No, I’ve yet to learn,” she said, remembering the Easter school vacations when her more affluent friends jetted off for a week on the bunny slopes of St. Moritz.
“Ah. Sail?” Quilt-Hogg persisted, following some mental checklist for dinner conversations.
“No.”
“Shoot?”
“No, I don’t like guns.” What was next, bungee polo?
“Shame,” he went on, clearly permitted to talk about himself after three refusals. “Got a couple of Purdeys, myself.”
“I always say there’s nothing like a nice pair of Purdeys, eh, Effie?” Mormal cut in. Xanthe and Lucinda giggled. The table was clearly regathering.
“He’s so leisure,” said Xanthe happily, to nobody in particular.
“Rather,” Quilt-Hogg agreed. “One’s a bit of an antique. My people gave me the other for my twenty-first birthday. Side-by-side self-opening sidelock. Cost a packet, hundred thou, cleaned out the old man’s bank account, but worth the dosh. So you don’t use a gun in your job, eh?”
“I’ve trained in marksmanship.”
“Ah. What do you police types use these days?”
“A Glock 17. I’ve also handled a Smith and Wesson revolver. A .38 model ten.”
“Most excellent! Fancy, a couple of rounds from one of those should put the wind up Johnny Foreigner, when he gets above himself.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Effie said tactfully. When the hell can we go home? she thought. Oh dear God, this wasn’t going to be one of those gatherings where the ladies withdraw from the table and leave the men to their cigars and brandy, was it?
“Get the shooters, George!” said Quilt-Hogg suddenly.