by Clare Curzon
By sight the main four members of CID had become familiar to her, three continually darting into crevices after titbits while their chief finned blandly around soaking up the atmosphere. She had watched him one morning gazing wide-eyed, into the pastry cook’s window, savouring the smell of fresh-baked bread like any hungry schoolboy; and again leaning chummily with the old codgers on the river wall, wreathed in a communal blue haze as they puffed out pipe smoke against the midges. He had seemed the sort of big, slow-smiling man you could too easily find yourself opening up to.
The morning he had appeared in the shop he was still driving the same green Rover and had parked it by the kerb to come in for chocolates. Briefly she’d wondered who the lucky lady they were intended for was, but mainly, while she made up his order, she had questioned whether she dared speak to him of a personal worry which nagged at her.
What decided her against it was Rita’s being present, with her sharp ears and her even sharper taste for fabricating scandal out of nothing. And perhaps not exactly nothing in this case.
But anyway the opportunity was lost because the instant he had paid for the chocolates her customer was off. Later that was something Leila would regret.
She stayed on at the shop a further half-hour until Maggie arrived to relieve her. That was a drawback in running a small-town business, this reliance on part-timers for staff. Housewives were dependable up to a point but their families came first; whch meant she was never entirely free herself. As well as retaining a financial interest and keeping the books, she was obliged to stand in as dogsbody to cover gaps caused by ailments, music lessons and the dentists’ appointments of other women’s children. Which stung her the more because she was childless herself.
She was fond of her teenage stepson and stepdaughter. In a curiously detached way they, she believed, returned their own, but inadequate, kind of fondness. There was a time when she had hoped that the arrival of a baby would bring new warmth and closeness to weld them all into a real family; but in that she’d failed, never becoming pregnant despite various efforts at medical intervention.
It hadn’t seemed to trouble Aidan. But then why should it? He had proved himself twice over, had already done with breeding and moved on to alternative interests almost totally scientific and academic, leaving her shamed as infertile and deficient. It didn’t help one’s self-esteem.
Within her husband’s professional circle she sensed herself regarded as a social accoutrement and little else, hardly a person in her own right and certainly an intellectual lightweight: almost like something inadvertently picked up on a shoe.
Once, she sadly thought, I counted: I had a future, if not precisely mapped out, at least roughly sketched. Studying for a degree in Modern History, barely eighteen years old and inexperienced, she had happened on the very campus where Aidan was the indisputable Big Shot currently in demand by the scholastic press and already making guest appearances on TV’s scientific programmes.
She was flattered to have gained his notice. They had danced together twice at the Freshers’ Ball, and a week later, passing in the quad, he had impulsively stopped in his tracks, his black gown billowing heroically in the wind, and asked her out to dinner.
There had been student gossip about him but she had taken it with quite a deal of salt. Apart from following his open lectures she had never encountered him in action, not being in the Faculty of Science. She quickly picked up that Arts undergraduates were by implication inferiors, and she accepted what seemed the common devaluation, seeing herself in every way many rungs down, while he, made of finer stuff, breathed a more rarefied air.
She was young and untried. He delighted in her coltish beauty, in watching her opening perception, her ready enthusiasms, even sometimes her unforeseeable reactions. He felt it incumbent on him to seduce her, which he did with a deal of practised skill and an unaccustomed persistence.
Halfway through her second year, when he was drinking overmuch, being between books and tetchily impatient for fresh inspiration, he uneasily discovered that he had actually proposed marriage and been happily accepted.
Scarcely four months earlier Marjorie, his longtime ailing wife, had departed this life taking with her his sole irrefutable excuse for withdrawal from entanglements. Partly through the mischief of colleagues, but mainly from the romantic imagination of genuinely interested onlookers, it became accepted that a wedding was planned for the Easter vacation. With preparations increasingly made on their behalf, he had found it more onerous to block than to accept the apparently inevitable.
So, on April 8, just over nine years back, Professor and Mrs Aidan Knightley had shaken the confetti out of their new, matching suitcases in an Athens hotel. They settled to conduct their honeymoon, in the sticky atmosphere of an unseasonal heatwave, while attending the International Conference of Physical Chemists and Allied Scientists.
Sex as a single girl, Leila then discovered, had been better.
The Saturday morning of Yeadings’ appearance, once Maggie had shown up, Leila retrieved her car from the shop’s rear courtyard and made posthaste homewards. Today was to be another of Aidan’s public occasions, so her place at his side was obligatory. Uncomfortably so, she knew in advance, because again she’d prove quite hopeless at sustaining his high level of discourse and would be passed on as intellectually inadequate to new acquaintances who would fail to find common ground. Finally she would be relegated to the dolly-bird role by any greybeards inclined to take the easy line of sexual badinage and unsuitably adolescent innuendo.
At home she found Aidan ready dressed and huffing with impatience. He was wearing a light summer suit in a milky tea shade, with beneath it a figured satin waistcoat which she considered utterly naff. Instead, either the waistcoat with open neck and shirtsleeves - quite mod - or the suit over a conservative cream shirt and plain silk tie: but never the mix.
It was his decision however and, equally stubborn, she let him wait while she took time over dressing.
She wasn’t totally downcast about the engagement. It was a glorious day and, however daunting the company, there was a lot to be said for lunch at Carlton House Terrace and drinking Pimms or champagne in the Royal Society’s upper salon overlooking the Mall. This was the second year they were to be grandstand guests as the Queen reviewed her Guards at Trooping the Colour. Aidan clearly saw the invitation as the prelude to his being proposed as an RS Fellow himself. His upward move from a provincial university to the new London appointment must surely serve towards that ambition.
They travelled up by chauffeured limousine, Aidan preferring the expense of hiring, rather than losing face searching for parking space on such a grand occasion. Dropped at the door, they entered the lofty hall, aquarium-cool and shady after brilliant sunshine. There was a babble of striving voices; perhaps more querulous than in the year before? Certainly the gathering by the stairs appeared to have aged by at least a decade since then.
Leila looked towards Aidan for a lead. He stood wirily erect, chest expanded, making the most of his five feet five inches, his ginger goatee outthrust (and clashing badly, she thought, with the rosy pattern of the deplorable waistcoat.)
He was waiting for recognition and acclaim. He could wait a long time here: everyone was so full of him- or herself, all volubly chattering while nobody listened. ‘Shall we go up?’ Leila suggested.
He began to acknowledge acquaintances. There were congratulations on the new appointment and compliments on his most recent publication. Leila listened for the tone rather than the words, wise enough by now to pick up on professional jealousies and false good wishes. Some faces were familiar through photographs in scientific journals or television appearances. One or two of the older Fellows smiled at her vaguely, remembering introductions last year. There were a number of desiccated ladies with authoritative voices but few younger men and those Aidan seemed not to know.
Across the terrace she recognized a bushy, dark moustache and caught Lord Winston’s eye. Kindly and ch
arming as ever, he smiled, too discreet to let it show they were professionally known to each other. Not presuming on his successes in human fertility and gene research, he would leave it to his subjects to approach if they wished.
Leila turned aside as a long flute of champagne was pushed into her hand. From far away she heard a brass band strike up a military march but few craned at the windows to watch. Upper branches from the Mall’s trees had been clipped for the occasion but still provided a hefty screen.
Unseen from Leila’s viewpoint, Queen Elizabeth distantly alighted from an open carriage at Horse Guards and took her stand on the parade ground’s dais.
‘She’s wearing bright yellow,’ shouted an elderly woman farther along who was using field glasses. She was one of the few who took much interest in the ceremony, or even in personal appearance. Not a smart lot, the Royal Society ladies. But then, with brains who needed fashion? Style without content was more the politicians’ line, Leila supposed.
Aidan was deep in conversation with their host, a geophysicist at Imperial College, and between them the technical terms were rolling like the credits for a Spielberg film. Leila felt herself an alien among this assembly of the country’s best, or most recognized, scientific brains.
‘Mrs Knightley,’ breathed a voice above her head. She recalled the man’s name: Sir Arthur Waites, a wizened beanpole with a few sparse hairs grown long to smear across his pale, bald peak in the vain hope of deception; but which any shaming breeze would float like filmy seaweed about his face. Last year he had been kind to her, so she owed him an effort.
Someone had told her that his wife, badly injured a year back in a car crash, was in a permanent vegetative state. Probably wiser in that case not to ask after her. She let him steer her by the elbow to an open window where there was a view of the military ritual.
Down on Horse Guards Parade the mass movement of red tunics and bulky black bearskins froze into stillness. On foot two solitaries advanced on each other with swords drawn, saluted, remained motionless, then retreated to their former positions. From one flank a group of riders approached centre front, jingling and jogging, with standards flying, dark uniforms bobbing under rather more merciful hats - busbies, weren’t they? She imagined they were Hussars but, viewed from so far away, they remained faceless toy soldiers.
By any standard the horses were magnificent. They performed some elaborate wheeling motion and presented a new pattern. Except for when the standards passed, the Queen had remained seated. In earlier times she would have saluted them from on horseback, gracefully seated side-saddle. This year she was dressed as a civilian but the Press had announced that as a Colonel-in-Chief, Princess Anne would be mounted astride.
Meaningless to Leila, the troops’ geometric combinations and permutations would continue for half an hour yet. While sections circled and wove, the sun bore down on serried, unmoving lines where only fear of their RSM’s blistering threats kept the sweltering ranks from dropping with heatstroke.
‘I suppose,’ she suggested to the maths-man beside her, ‘that you admire all this geometric precision.’
‘Not really,’ he admitted, sipping slowly at his Bollinger. ‘My principal interest is in the chaos theory. I get high on cause and effect.’
She looked again at Waites. Perhaps he was more interesting than she’d assumed. He had been talking Oceanology with a stout woman to Leila’s left and without actually eavesdropping she’d picked up an intriguing term foreign to her.
‘What is an algorithm?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Logarithms I’ve a vague memory of from school. So is algorithm just a mathematician’s joke anagram of the same?’
Waites came suddenly alive. ‘It might well be. You’d have to ask the Ancient Greeks.’ He considered for a moment. ‘To give you the broad definition, it’s a procedure to solve a well-defined problem in a routine manner. We use it to deal with equations; perform calculations and construct geometrical figures; sort our data.’
He was becoming quite pink with enthusiasm, waving his empty champagne flute perilously close to her hat brim. ‘To take a simple example: when a computer arranges a list - of, say, your party guests - into alphabetical order, that is performed by an algorithmic procedure of moving upwards initial letters according to pre-imposed pattern; then the second letters in the same way; and so on through each word until the required order is achieved.
‘Euclid himself contrived a mathematical algorithm to find the highest common factor, or divisor. Take for instance the numbers 35 and 150. Divide the greater by the smaller and the remainder is 10. Now divide the original 35 by that remainder and the new remainder is 5. Next divide your 10 by that 5 and the remainder is nought. Arriving at zero remainder proves that both original numbers are divisible by the last number you have reached. And that, being the first to obtain zero, is the greatest.’
‘Which was 5,’ she said faintly, accepting but still not seeing why. She had always imagined a parallel between mathematics and religion: that reasoning in either was beyond her. Which left only a choice of blind faith or disbelief.
He was beaming at her delightedly through thick lenses which made his eyes into huge, dark beetles, his wire-rimmed spectacles askew on the beaky nose.
Well, she had brought that on herself. To escape sinking further out of her depth, she glanced past him, seemed to recognise an acquaintance and gave a little social wave. ‘It was lovely meeting you again,’ she lied, smiled and moved on.
‘Gorgeous hat,’ intervened an old goat breathing brandy fumes over her. She kept her gaze ahead, content in the knowledge that a wide brim ensured a certain degree of privacy. Few dared plunge under to kiss since the exercise required some co-operation from the wearer.
Perhaps the best part was the luncheon itself, although she sat in a group of Aidan’s choosing. Happily the vein of high-flown technicalities appeared to have dried up, but their pettish talk was mainly of research underfunding, grumbles at the government and (from the more elderly) unpleasant details of ill health.
Leila refused the offer of liqueurs with the coffee, hoping that Aidan might do the same, but he was set on going the whole hog, by now flushed and self-important. Not that there and then it would be noticeably unique.
Returning from the ladies’ room she found him alone, strutting about the hall, waving his mobile phone and loudly complaining that he’d sent for the car ten minutes back and the bloody chauffeur hadn’t turned up. When he did, Aidan gave him the Ozymandias brush-off.
‘God,’ he said, leaning back against the cushions, ‘what a lot of boring old farts they are. I’ll be glad to get home.’
Not more, Leila thought, than she would. There was plenty to do there; at least six tea chests remained to be unpacked from the old house, and family guests were expected tomorrow for lunch.
Chapter 5
Leila’s Uncle Charles was a big man in several ways, but wherever he was invited and took along his middle-aged mistress, he invariably introduced her as his housekeeper. Leila, feminist rebel over this if nothing else, had once questioned what she considered a slight. Janey, subject of the disagreement, was forthright about it. ‘Housekeep is what I do. Wife I’m not. And what we get up to in the bedroom is between him and me.’
She was a totally honest woman, or as near as dammit. She had a flat, rectangular face, with a straight nose and high, straight brows set precisely at right angles to it. The parchment-pale flesh over her cheeks fitted tightly to the bony infrastructure so that her lips often drew apart, making her look slightly aghast; which she never was. Her manner was always calmly pragmatic, and Leila was very fond of her.
They arrived for lunch half an hour early which irritated Aidan although, knowing Charles, he should have expected it. ‘Tell me what I can do to help,’ Janey offered.
‘Sit down, relax and stop fussing, woman,’ Charles growled. ‘Where are your kids, Aidan? Backpacking to Taiwan or prostrate over exams?’
‘Edward’s in the States, fixing himse
lf up with some research into Artificial Intelligence. Chloe’s staying with her grandmother in Nice.’
If Aidan had hoped to dazzle the older man he was disappointed.
‘So Eddie’s into robotics, eh? Great future in that. Especially in astronavigation. Gone to Houston, I suppose.’
Leila darted him a glance. His response was too instant and informed. She guessed Eddie had been writing to Charles. Which could indicate he was short of money again.
(And Charles not even a blood relative, although both children preferred to ignore that shortcoming.)
‘We thought you might like to look over the house,’ she suggested, ‘while I finish getting lunch.’
Charles sat on over his drink, digging himself out for the guided tour with Aidan just minutes before the hot meal was ready for serving.
‘And the wicked old thing knows exactly what he’s doing,’ Janey remarked confidently, sitting on the kitchen table and swinging her legs like a teenager. ‘As in Alice, “He only does it to annoy/ Because he knows it teases.” I do think you’ve got yourself a lovely house here, Leila.’
‘It will be, I think, but there’s a lot to be done. I’m glad Aidan decided against living in London. I just hope the commuting doesn’t get him down.’
‘A grand new job, a grand new house, with both the kids growing up and away. This will be a quite different lifestyle for you both. So what are your plans?’
Leila straightened after transferring the roast beef from cooker shelf to cork mat and paused a moment, hands in oven gloves on her hips. ‘Do you know, Janey, I’ve no idea. Aidan will be pretty involved with the university, of course.’