The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Have I been talking a long time?”

  “Not that long, Dad. Just ten minutes or so.”

  “Do you know, I feel tired. I think I’ll try and have a little sleep.”

  He closed his eyes. Hester came over and eased him down into his bed. Then she tucked him up, and the two of them tiptoed out of the room. They found Mrs. Mackie, busy with the varied wants and whims of her “guests,” and thanked her for making Oddie welcome. Then they walked back to Hester’s home in near silence, Oddie trying to absorb what he had heard. When Hester had made coffee and fetched biscuits, they settled down in her airy and comfortable living room for a talk.

  “How much did you believe?” Marius’s sister asked Oddie.

  “I don’t know. If I hadn’t done a bit of work on your brother before I came here, I’d probably have believed all of it. Your dad seemed so…lively, on the ball, so proud and full of everything that concerned his son. Was it all fantasy?”

  “All the recent stuff? No, it wasn’t. Life is never as neat as books, is it? Bert—I can’t call him Marius, it sounds so bogus—left Pontefract about 1969, when he left school. He was training with Morrison’s, as Dad said, and they’re a Northern company, as you must know. We saw quite a lot of him while he was a trainee manager—Mum would have had his guts for garters if he hadn’t shown up pretty regularly.”

  “Was he afraid of her?”

  She considered.

  “Bert was never obviously afraid of anyone or anything. But I’d say he was morally afraid. She had standards, she made sure she passed them on to us, and I think she thought she had done. Bert was always on his best behavior when Mum was around and watching him. While he was at school she made sure he was in by ten, did his homework and all that, and when he had girlfriends she vetted them. Of course, I knew more about what he actually got up to than she did. Once he’d become a trainee manager her nannying him wasn’t possible anymore, but she still had enough influence to make sure that he came back every other weekend, went with Dad to a game, took us all to one of the good shopping towns, told us what he was doing. Of course, that was a sanitized version. I suspected it at the time, but whether Mum and Dad did too I never knew. He’d left home two or three years when Mum was diagnosed as having cancer.”

  “And I suppose he was around a lot of the time then.”

  “Yes, he was. He was a good son to her up till the time she died, which was about six months later. And it went against the grain. Bert didn’t like illness or unhappiness or unpleasantness. He came up to see her in the evenings, passed an hour or so with her, then went back to Leeds or Manchester or wherever. Said he was busy at weekends being relief manager in one or other of their stores. Really, I think that weekends were too long to be in the vicinity of pain and misery. A quick evening visit was about his measure.”

  Oddie seemed to sense a well of bitterness there, or at least cynicism about her brother.

  “I think maybe his girlfriends found the same thing in him,” he said.

  “I can imagine. Of course I knew some of his early girlfriends. One minute he’d be there, the next minute gone. He’d avoid recriminations and emotional mess like the plague. I expect poor Caroline Fawley would have found the same thing before long. Such a nice woman she always seems—but I suppose like everyone else I’m just thinking of the parts she plays on television.”

  “So far as I can judge she’s not so different from her roles…. And after your mother’s death, did things change?”

  “Yes, but not immediately. No drastic cutoff point. But come the midseventies, when he started out on his own, then his visits and phone calls—I never recall any letters—became fewer. That was about the time he bought Dad the house he mentioned.”

  “So that was true?”

  “Oh yes. It’s about ten minutes’ walk from here—a nice house, to our way of thinking, pretty much like this one. Mum would have loved it.”

  “But your dad wasn’t so keen?”

  “Oh no, he loved it. You’re jumping to conclusions—putting things into typical fictional patterns. Dad was happy as Larry, and proud—you’ve no idea! He was always a good mixer, was Dad, so the fact that he was suddenly transported to a middle-class area didn’t faze him. He’d always got on well with my friends from teachers’ college, and my colleagues at school, and for a long time he had lodgers in the house, usually students at the Pontefract Poly. No, I just mentioned Mum because I was thinking how happy they would have been together in it, Mum and he. And perhaps Mum would have kept Bert up to the mark. Dad, I think, misunderstood….”

  “What do you mean, misunderstood?”

  She sat for a few moments, gathering together her thoughts.

  “You know what sometimes happens when children from pretty ordinary families—I don’t like the term ‘working class’—get educated, or make money, and move up in the awful English class system. There’s not just an obvious gulf between parents and children, there’s a gulf of understanding as well as social standing. The children don’t really know what worries or hurts their parents, and the parents try to cling to the idea that the children haven’t changed, that everything is as it was when they were little. That house, for example—”

  “The one he bought your dad?”

  “Yes. I think Dad saw it as a sign that Bert wanted to keep in touch with his roots, have a foothold in the North. And when the visits became fewer and fewer Dad started ringing him at work—he got the number of the Fleetwood Group somehow or other, maybe just from Directory Inquiries—and he’d chide him about never seeing him, about the fact that he was losing his Yorkshire accent, and so on, and so on. Finally he went too far and Bert snapped and told him a few home truths.”

  “Because the house hadn’t been his way of keeping in touch, had it?”

  “No. It had been a way of buying Dad off. And that was essentially the end. No invitation to the wedding, or the christenings. Simple card at Christmas with just a signature—the new name. He used Dad’s pestering as an excuse, I’m sure. He’d wanted to make a clean break for some time, and that gave him a flimsy sort of reason. Dad was devastated.”

  Oddie sat thinking for a bit.

  “And was this break total?” he asked finally. “Did it extend to you too?”

  “My card was signed ‘Love, Marius,’” she said wryly. “And more recently, ‘Love, Marius, Sheila, Guy, and Helena.’ That was after we’d seen each other again, had a bit of a talk.”

  “How did you come to meet up again?”

  She clearly would have preferred not to talk about it, but she poured them both second cups of coffee and forced herself to.

  “Tom, my husband, died three years ago. We’d had a very happy marriage, a son we both loved and got on well with—he’s at Harvard at the moment, doing a doctoral thesis on something I barely understand. Tom was a teacher too—a wonderful one, far better than I am…. He got so depressed with the way education was going in this country: the regimentation, the suppressing of everything that isn’t strictly utilitarian, the denial of flair and imagination in the teaching profession—above all the grisly farce of the inspections, which skew the whole school for months in advance.”

  She left a long silence. Oddie waited.

  “During the run-up to an inspection of his school he committed suicide. He felt his work had become a gross betrayal of all he’d ever stood for…. I felt so angry. I sent round a letter to all his friends and relations telling them that his death was suicide and why he had done it. One of the people I sent it to was Bert.”

  “And he came straight up to you?”

  “No. In one of the old type of Hollywood films he would have, wouldn’t he? But it was months after the funeral and the inquest—maybe three months. It was one of those lonely evenings: one eventually gets used to them, but never quite accepts them. There was a ring on the doorbell, and when I opened it, there was Bert. Twenty-five years older than when I’d seen him last, but
unmistakably Bert. He just said ‘Hello, Hester,’ and my face was on his shoulder and I was crying all over his expensive suit. And he was putting his arms around me and saying that he’d hoped that I was getting over it.”

  “What happened?”

  “He came in. We had coffee and cakes—funeral bake-meats, belatedly. I had a few little weeps. We talked about Tom—they’d never met—and what a good man he was. ‘I’ve never understood good people,’ Bert said. He listened, and he comforted. It was wonderful having him around again, even though I knew it would be brief. He told me about his wife and his children—just normal family stuff, but I was glad that at last I knew something. He didn’t tell me about his other women, of course. When he was showing signs of leaving, towards nine o’clock, I came out and asked him to do something for me.”

  “Visit his father.”

  “Yes. I knew Bert, knew his moods, and this was a good one. I felt sure nothing could go wrong. He knew the house, but I walked with him anyway, and left him at the end of the road. When I kissed him good-bye he said, ‘Aren’t you coming with me?’ but I don’t think he really wanted me to. He knew it would be best with just the two of them on their own. I phoned Dad the next day after school and he was over the moon. Just kept talking on and on about what Bert had said, what he’d told him about his businesses, his family, his houses. I was so glad I’d asked him to do it. I heard afterwards from Dad’s neighbor that he’d seen Bert leaving about half past nine, so he wasn’t there more than half an hour. But I was so happy for weeks afterwards that he’d made it up with Dad, and that he really felt for me in my loneliness.”

  “And then?”

  She shrugged.

  “Does there have to be an ‘And then’?”

  “You didn’t rush to contact us when your brother was killed. I don’t get the feeling you’ll be at the funeral.”

  She pondered.

  “I want to put this as clearly and simply as possible, but I don’t want to seem a complete fool…. I suppose it was naive of me, but I thought his coming to see us would lead to something: a bit more contact, a telephone call now and then, even an invitation to stay with him and his family in London. But there was nothing. Just the card at Christmas, signed with the extra names, like I said. The effect was cruel rather than kindly—not the intention, I’m sure, but the effect.”

  “What do you think the intention was?”

  “I don’t know. You see, I don’t know ‘Marius,’ only the young Bert. But I would guess it was just some momentary impulse, one weekend when he happened to be in Leeds and had nothing special to occupy an evening. ‘I’ll go and see Hester. She’s just lost her husband.’ Not a bad impulse at all. Something left over from Mum’s influence, just a trace left of her standards, her feelings about how one should behave. But incredibly skin-deep. Once he’d done that little bit of his duty, it was just forgotten—nothing followed it, not as far as he was concerned.”

  “But it did have consequences, didn’t it—for your Dad?”

  “I thought you might have guessed that. You’ve known people going towards senility, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Oddie, his face twisting. “My mother.”

  “I should emphasize that you saw him today at something approaching his best. On other days he can just drift in and out of consciousness and hardly says anything with any grasp of reality—those are the days when he’s at his worst. But Bert’s visit was towards the beginning of the process, and he was so overjoyed by it that it was the start of this fantasy: Bert was a good son, he came back regularly, they went to sporting fixtures together, he said things that Dad could quote to people, he even used to claim that Bert consulted him about business affairs.”

  “And, in fact, there was nothing between that one visit and his death?”

  “Nothing. But the fantasy cheered Dad up no end, and I never tried to disabuse him of it. I did ring Bert once in the years since his visit. It was when Dad was taken into the nursing home, about six months ago. I found his number by Dad’s phone, and I rang him to tell him what had happened and why.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He was quite brief and businesslike about it. I explained that I wanted to keep my job, and couldn’t nurse him during the day, and he said he understood, that he was too busy to talk, but I was to send the bills for the nursing home—the part that was not covered by his pension—to him and he’d see to them. And that was it.”

  “You were disappointed, I imagine.”

  “Yes, I was. Again,” she added wryly. “The bills weren’t the reason I’d rung him. I thought about it, but in the end—I’m a teacher, and there are no rich teachers—I did send the bills to him. They were always paid. But I felt I was doing things on his terms, that he had enclosed me in a world run by his values. And I wondered whether people around him always had to do that.”

  “I rather think they did,” Oddie said. He began to shift in his chair. “Is there anything else about your brother that you’d like to tell me?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She got up, and they began walking toward the front door. In the hallway she stopped and turned to him, and surprised him with a question.

  “Did you know D. H. Lawrence was called ‘Bert’ at home?”

  Oddie shook his head. That was one odd fact that he had not learned from his wife.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “David Herbert Lawrence, known to his family as Bert.”

  “I think I’d go for ‘David Herbert’ myself.”

  “And when he met his sisters later in life, years after he’d flown the nest, and they still referred to him as ‘our Bert,’ he didn’t like it at all. ‘I’m not their Bert,’ he said, ‘and I never was.’”

  Oddie stood on the doorstep and looked at her.

  “You feel you didn’t know him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you never knew the real man.”

  “Yes. I feel that as a boy he must always have been playing some kind of game or charade with us, waiting to get away to become the real him…. I told you, didn’t I, that I knew some of his girlfriends—the ones he had while he was still a boy?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “They were all strong people—independent, intelligent girls, with a good future in front of them, if they worked and fought. He left them miserable, uncertain, unsure of themselves and their capabilities.”

  “That’s interesting. There may be some kind of pattern in his chosen women.”

  “And maybe he met someone too strong to be used like that.”

  Chapter 18

  Gathering

  the Threads

  When Charlie arrived at CID on Saturday morning, his boss was just finishing a phone call.

  “Yes—that was rather what I suspected. The other information was interesting, but I can’t really see it as having any bearing on the case—unless our view of it changes drastically. I’m grateful to you for your time. I know you must be pretty stressed out at the moment.” He put the phone down. “That was the manager at the Fleetwood Group’s headquarters.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “What’s our interest there?”

  Oddie spread his hands.

  “When a rich man is murdered we can’t ignore the fact of his riches. We need to know what’s going to happen to the boodle. And there are other ramifications, such as whether there were any of his rivals who obviously would like him out of the way.”

  “A bit mafioso that, isn’t it? I don’t often want to sound complacently English, but I don’t think firms here usually go around getting their rivals put permanently out of business.”

  “Nor do I, but who knows? There’s a school of thought that says we’re being taken over by the Russian mobsters. Anyway, the truth as sent down from headquarters is that he was planning a cautious, exploratory expansion into the North—hardly a threat to the dominance of the big boys in this area. And that will go ahea
d in any case: his death changes nothing—the group is too big for that. And his fortune all goes to his wife.”

  Charlie chuckled.

  “His marriage was far from over, then.”

  “We suspected that. I wonder if he’d tried that one on lots of his women, or if it was a new one specially framed for Caroline Fawley. I think his marriage and his affairs represent a rather eighteenth-century sort of arrangement. There is the regular mistress, but the wife is the one of real importance. I think at the Fleetwood Group they would like Sheila to take on an important role. Apparently she is something of a whiz at getting things done in the arts organizations she chairs, and also good on the PR side. I gather from my contact that she is insisting that until the baby is born, she can’t make any decisions like that, and they’ll have to appoint a stopgap chairman. Maybe what she is trying to do is make sure nothing permanent is decided until Guy grows up a bit.”

  “That might mean a very long wait.”

  “It might indeed. Anyway, all this is interesting, but not really for us, I don’t think.”

  “Nor do I. What do we do now? Pause for breath?”

  “I think so. Do stocktakings, like prime ministers do: call together the cabinet and say, ‘Where are we at, and where are we going?’”

  “And the answer in politics is ‘nowhere’ as a rule,” said Charlie. “We haven’t got a cabinet, though, have we? Hargreaves is a good, solid bloke, but his brain is never going to solve any of the mysteries of the universe. Troops are thin on the ground.”

  “We could call in Rani,” suggested Oddie. “He did a lot of the bystander-witness interviewing, and he’s just been talking to Walter Fairlie, who did the work at the Crescent. But mostly he could be useful as an outsider, a sounding board, if you like: someone who knows the circumstances of the murder but not all the psychological network behind it. Having him here will force us to go over all the details, maybe get a new perspective.”