“Entirely my fault,” I heard Geoffrey Pidgeon say. He was standing a couple of feet behind her, in the shadows, so I hadn’t noticed him.
“I hate these gatherings,” she went on, “but Edgar always makes me come, so he can watch me watching him. Look how happy he is! My husband—he enjoys flaunting his latest conquest in public while I look on.”
“So does mine,” I responded.
“Oh, Mother,” Emily moaned. “He’s not actually—”
“I think Mrs. Stone put it very well,” I said.
She cocked her head and regarded me curiously, and then burst out laughing, with a slight edge of hysteria. People stopped talking and looked over uneasily.
“Have you taken your medication, Mrs. Stone?” Emily asked her in a low voice.
“No,” she retorted loudly, “I haven’t taken it. I’ve just had rather a large glass of sherry instead, and it’s made me feel much better than medicine does. What do you think of that?”
Emily replied, “I think you showed good judgment in not mixing drugs and alcohol.”
Perdita’s defiant attitude disappeared in a second. Her eyes lighted with excitement, and she grabbed Emily’s hand. “I didn’t want to be all muzzy tonight. I wanted to enjoy your husband’s success with you like a friend, not like a patient—”
“Yes, I’d like that too,” Emily said, smiling down at her.
We heard Cyril Aubrey’s diffident voice and turned to see him standing in the middle of the room, rumpling his hair nervously as he said, “I suppose it’s time we fulfilled our purpose in gathering tonight.”
All eyes turned to him, and people grew quiet. Emily stepped over to Peter and took hold of his arm, and they smiled at each other happily.
“It has been almost twenty years since I established the faculty of non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama at Mercy,” Cyril Aubrey began, “and very satisfying years they have been. But it’s time now to hand the reins, as it were, to another. Time to start down a different path.”
“You’re far too young to retire,” Dorothy said. “Ought to wait until you’re a weary old party.”
“Well, Ann would not agree,” he went on, smiling at his wife. “She has all sorts of plans for us, travel, study—I’m rather vague as to the details, but she can give you the complete schedule.”
“I’ve been waiting for years, quite like Patient Griselda,” Ann said.
“The choice of successor to a headship at Mercy is traditionally the decision of the retiring head alone,” he went on, getting more nervous as the big moment approached. “Once he—or, in these days, I should say she as well—has informed the college council of that decision, the office is considered conferred. Mercy is fortunate in its faculty, fortunate indeed, and so the choice has not been an easy one.”
Emily was hugging Peter’s arm, and he was doing his best to look as if all this was of only casual interest to him.
Aubrey fumbled with his glasses, taking them off, wiping them with his handkerchief, putting them back on and blinking at us nervously through them.
“Oh, do get on with it,” Dorothy demanded. “Don’t keep the poor fellow in suspense!”
“Well,” he resumed, “I have finally come to the conclusion that the headship will be best bestowed upon our longtime colleague Edgar Stone, and have so informed the council.”
Complete silence fell over the room. The faculty stared in astonishment as he shook Edgar’s hand, and then a hoarse cry startled everyone.
“No!” Perdita Stone was on her feet, staring wide-eyed at the two men. “No, you can’t do that!” she cried. “You can’t reward murder, you can’t—”
She stepped toward them, shaking her head in disbelief.
“I’ve told you,” she said pleadingly to Aubrey, “I’ve written you letters telling you what he did—didn’t you get my letters?”
“We’ve all got your letters, my dear,” said Dorothy sadly.
Everyone watched her in acute discomfort, except for Edgar. His eyes glittered, and that unpleasant smile twitched his lips. He was enjoying this.
“Yes, you’ve done your best to humiliate me and destroy my career, sending those ridiculous missives to everyone who knows me—haven’t you, darling?” he said mockingly. “Fortunately, they all know you’re barking mad.”
Emily threw him a dirty look as she and Geoffrey tried to get Perdita to sit down quietly. But she shook them off.
“You want punishing, for what you did to Simon—and instead you are rewarded!” She finally sank into her chair and then cried out in a voice that shook with genuine passion, “ ‘Justice! Oh, justice! Oh, my son, my son—my son whom naught can ransom or redeem!’ ”
Edgar clapped his hands three times, slowly. “Brava!” he cried, still grinning. “A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but then The Spanish Tragedy is that kind of play.”
“Oh, I say,” Cyril Aubrey exclaimed, “you make the poor woman feel—”
“ ‘Roscius, when once he spake a speech in Rome—’ ” Edgar began, gazing at him steadily. Cyril broke off and turned away sadly.
“Heywood?” Dorothy ventured, but Edgar ignored her.
Geoffrey threw him a glance of sheer hatred before turning his attention back to Perdita. “Come along, let me escort you home,” he begged.
“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Emily joined in, kneeling beside the chair to look into her eyes. “It would be best if you went home now. I’ll come with you, if you like.”
Her anger had subsided into dull despair now. “It can’t be allowed,” she said, as if to herself, then she stood up. “Yes, I want to be out of this place, away from these people. Not one of you understands what simple justice is!” she flung at them.
She left with Geoffrey, refusing Emily’s offer to go along.
Edgar looked around at the faces of his colleagues, his eyes glittering with amusement. “Well, I’m surprised too! Aubrey, dear fellow, you’ve staged a coup! Didn’t we all expect the wunderkind, Tyler, to be chosen, just because he’d written a popular book?”
“Now, now, old fellow,” Aubrey said, “we all know Tyler’s book is more than just ‘popular,’ it’s an extremely important work that casts a whole new light—”
“Important?” Stone laughed aloud. “It’s a sensationalist hodgepodge of unbsubstantiated guesswork. It’s the kind of vulgar popularization these young fellows coming up call ‘scholarship’ because they’re too lazy to do proper research.”
“Unfair, Edgar!” Dorothy snorted angrily.
Cyril Aubrey, increasingly woebegone, exclaimed, “Oh, I say, there’s no call to insult Tyler’s work.” He turned to Peter and begged, “I was sure you’d understand, Tyler, age and experience, you know…”
Peter, although he had become paler as Edgar Stone went on, controlled what he must have been feeling and said in a steady voice, “Quite right. I’ll say nothing, Stone, except for ‘Congratulations.’ ”
“What noble restraint!” Stone sneered.
“Indeed,” said Dorothy indignantly, “ ‘Calumnies are answered best with silence.’ ” She looked around with fire in her blurry eyes. “Jonson, Volpone!”
“By God, if no one else will say it, I shall,” Tom Ivey burst out. “Edgar Stone isn’t fit to be head of college! He’ll discourage every sign of original thinking and run the place like a petty dictatorship.”
“Come along, Tom,” Aubrey pleaded, “I know Edgar better than any of you, and I know you’re wrong about him. I hate to say it, but I fear you are letting personal animus over—well, romantic matters affect your judgment. Peter, who could just as well do the same, is able to keep his feelings subordinate to his judgment, and you might—”
“What do you mean,” Peter interrupted, his eyes narrowing, “I ‘could do the same’?”
Aubrey stared at him, at first in surprise and then in dismay. “Oh—do you mean that you didn’t know—Oh, my dear boy, I assure you I meant nothing whatever! It was only a slip of the tongue, I mean to say—”
Edgar Stone gave a startling bark of laughter. “That’s torn it, Cyril!” he said happily. “In your usual bumbling manner, you’ve given away the deep dark secret little Mrs. Tyler and I have been keeping. I should never have told you about that incident, should I?”
Peter looked at Emily in amazement. She was glaring at Stone with cold scorn.
“I wouldn’t have told anyone,” she said. “If I could wipe it from my memory I would. It was the most disgusting thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“My God,” Peter breathed. “Are you saying he tried—”
“This has got to stop!” Dorothy bellowed, rising with some difficulty from her chair. “I declare this party over. I’ve never witnessed such appalling behavior, and as for you and this outrageous blunder you’ve made, Cyril Aubrey—”
“Edgar,” young Gemma broke in, her voice trembling, “you didn’t really come on to Peter’s wife, did you?”
“You sick sadist,” Peter said, giving up the struggle for self-control. “I knew what a goat you were, but you will not insult my wife and get away with it!”
He stepped toward Stone while Emily begged, “No, Peter, don’t make it worse! It was only once, and I got rid of him easily!” Quin grabbed his arm to stop him.
Edgar Stone was obviously having the time of his life.
“What a stimulating evening!” he said. “But I believe Dorothy’s correct, our revels now had better be ended.” He walked to a sofa loaded with coats and purses, took a bowler hat from the pile, and put it on at a jaunty angle.
“Come along, my dear fellows,” Aubrey pleaded, “let bygones—I mean to say, you’re going to have to work together, aren’t you? Any animosity will make it most difficult. Do put all this behind you!”
Edgar turned and looked at Peter. “Do you know, Tyler, I find it hard to see how we can work together, after the way you addressed me just now. Yes—when I become head at the end of term, I’m afraid I shall have to demand your resignation—for the sake of staff morale.”
He gave one of his little mocking bows, and left us.
Everyone had had enough, and the gathering broke up pretty quickly. Though left alone, Gemma repulsed Tom’s attempt to escort her. Poor Aubrey stood there watching us go like a child who’s been sent to Coventry for misbehavior. Quin and Emily went out on either side of Peter, talking to him earnestly, and the Barbie trailed behind them.
When I reached the street I almost had another collision, this time with Dorothy Shipton. She’d started up the street, then hurried back when I emerged from the entranceway.
“I say, are you hungry?” she demanded. “I’m starving! Mercy’s known for the paucity of food at its do’s. Besides which, I’m a bit unnerved by all that happened—and I’d rather not go back to my empty house just yet.” When I admitted to a certain hollowness, she went on, “Fancy a doner kebab, then?”
“I’ve no idea what that is,” I admitted.
She led me quickly up St. Aldate’s to a small square beside a Gothic church where several undergraduates stood around eating from Styrofoam boxes, dripping red sauce on the paving stones. A large white van stood there, humming loudly and emitting rank fumes. The top half of one side was open, and in the bright lights inside two Arab men were cooking on a grill. I saw a column of pressed lamb turning on an upright spit, as I’d seen before in Greek restaurants in New York.
A doner kebab turned out to be the same kind of pita sandwich Americans call a gyro, only instead of yogurt sauce, the lamb strips, lettuce, and tomatoes were topped with mayonnaisy coleslaw and a thin “chili” sauce with a definite bite.
“The kebab vans are a sort of Oxford tradition,” Dorothy told me as we sat on a low stone wall to eat. “They come out when the sun goes down and stay open until the wee hours of the morning.”
Sitting in front of an ancient church, looking across the street at Wren’s great Tom Tower looming over Christ Church College, eating a Middle-Eastern sandwich while buses roared past, I got a distinctly Alice-in-Wonderland feeling, although Dorothy didn’t seem to notice the incongruities.
“Now, I do want to apologize for my colleague’s appalling behavior,” she said in her gruff way. “Edgar Stone has always been a difficult man, and his treatment of his wife is quite beyond the pale. His faults have increased as he’s aged, until I really think he’s become unbalanced. God knows what’s going to happen to our little faculty.” She shook her head.
“Why did Mercy College ever hire such a man?” I asked.
“Ah, well, he used to have some reputation as a scholar. And then, this Elizabethan staff has been a cohesive group for a long time. We were all undergraduates together at Magdalen, you see, although it was really the OUDS that made us such a close-knit group. Oh, I’m sorry,” she went on, seeing my blank look, “that’s the Oxford University Dramatic Society. We all acted in its productions.” She pulled out a packet of tissues and gave me one, and we both concentrated for a minute on removing the runny red sauce from our hands and faces. Then she went on. “Perdita was actually a wonderful actress, and a brilliant scholar as well, quite different from the poor creature you’ve just seen. All the men were in love with her, especially Geoffrey Pidgeon, who seemed to have won her until Edgar suddenly made a dead set at her. He can be very charming, although you wouldn’t guess that from tonight’s exhibition. He still has great success with young women. He’s been causing a ridiculous scandal with that little graduate assistant. But I only meant to say, I wish you’d seen us in more civilized form.”
“I wasn’t so civilized myself,” I said sheepishly.
We finished our sandwiches and then she stood up, saying, “Well, I shan’t keep you longer, although going home is not pleasant for me. My dear friend of thirty years died less than a year ago, and since she’s been gone I don’t seem able to get used to being alone.” Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily with the back of her hand. “Stupid of me!”
“Not at all. I understand,” I said softly. “It takes time.”
“Sorry. Behaving like a sentimental fool.”
She had insisted on paying for the kebabs, so it wasn’t until I had almost reached the road to Far Wychwood, my lips still tingling from the chili sauce, that I noticed my purse wasn’t on the car seat beside me. I pulled over and looked on the floor and the back seat, but finally I had to admit it must still be on that sofa in the Senior Common Room.
One more memory failure, I thought as I turned the car around and headed back into Oxford—one more disquieting reminder of my age.
When I drove back past the house Tom had pointed out as the Stones’, a woman was almost running down the path, and as she came through the gate I was astounded to see that it was Quin’s girlfriend. She was carrying a tote bag with a picture of Big Ben on it, and she looked strangely agitated, casting glances over her shoulder at the house, where only one downstairs window showed a light.
What reason could she have to go to Edgar Stone’s house? Not a single one came to me, unless—but that was ridiculous. Had Quin actually got himself involved with some sort of nymphomaniac, who would make an assignation with another man the first time she met him? What kind of craziness was going on here?
The porter at Mercy College unlocked the Senior Common Room and helped me to find my purse, which had fallen down beside the sofa. I was retracing my path within about half an hour from the time I’d started back.
I heard the screaming before I got to the Stones’ house, and then the siren as I pulled up by the curb. There was light streaming out of the open front doorway now, and a light on upstairs as well as down. A woman was screaming inside the house, people were emerging from their houses up and down the street to see what was happening. And, most bewildering of all, I recognized my son-in-law’s car parked at the curb, just ahead of mine.
The siren got so loud it hurt my ears as two black-and-white police cars swung into the street and pulled up beside my car. I was followed by three constable
s as I ran into the house. I saw a staircase at the end of a short hallway and Perdita Stone, dressed only in a silky gray nightgown, backing slowly up the stairs. Her eyes were very wide, her long black hair loose and wild, her hands pressed to her mouth as if in a futile attempt to hold the screams back.
The police ran through the open door of the lighted room on my right, and I followed them. Edgar Stone was huddled on the floor in a corner, staring without blinking, a white telephone lying beside him, disconnected from the wall. A large, gold letter-opener stuck out of his chest, and his shirt, the flowered carpet around him, and the white telephone gleamed with his blood.
The constables had already mobbed the only other person in the room. I saw my son-in-law, Peter, standing beside the dead man. Our eyes met for a moment as the police, shouting their legal formula, pinned his arms back and began to handcuff him.
Chapter Three
In case, afterward also, in riper years he chance to be set on fire with this coveting of love, he ought to be good and circumspect, and heedful that he beguile not himself to be led willfully into the wretchedness that in young men deserveth more to be pitied than blamed and contrariwise in old men, more to be blamed than pitied.
—Thomas Hoby, “The Courtier”
I was well acquainted with the Oxford City Police Headquarters, having been interviewed there after one of my narrow escapes. Not only that, I was acquainted with a detective sergeant who worked there, my friend Fiona’s husband. So when Peter, Perdita Stone, and I were ushered through the entrance by that pack of constables, I immediately started throwing his name around.
“I want to see John Bennett,” I told the officer behind the reception desk. “There’s been some terrible mistake, these people have actually put handcuffs on my son-in-law! Why they’d think he could possibly have—”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Perdita was babbling hysterically. The officers had prevailed on her to put on some shoes and a coat, but below it her nightgown fluttered around her ankles. “I woke up because there was noise downstairs, and he was dead. He looked more horrible than Simon did, much more!”
Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow Page 4