It was when the next vaporetto was coming in, and I was already waving to my wife, that I became suddenly conscious of what had so oddly escaped my memory. For a moment I was quite horrified – so heavy-footed did I seem to have been in treating my newly recovered friend to that small grim impression of crime as it exists not in fiction but in fact. In a way, indeed, it had been Freddie’s own fault. If he had supposed me ignorant of a substantial fact about himself, he had done nothing to enlighten me. If he had more reasonably concluded – what was, of course, the case – that I had almost freakishly failed to remember that fact, it hadn’t pleased him to give my memory more than the most maliciously equivocal of jolts. But now it all lay before me. Freddie Seston was not only the man who wrote books about the Venetian painters. He was the man who wrote detective stories – although under some pseudonym which I still for the moment couldn’t recollect. I had a notion that the other Freddie’s industry had been considerable, and that his contributions to this mysterious species of writing were numbered by the dozen. I was quite clear that curiosity had never drawn me to look into one. And I had at least the comfort of tumbling to the fact that this was a neglect that Freddie himself would not resent – was probably never in the habit of resenting. Still, I had put my foot in it.
There was no reason why I should have reflected, as the little gangway of the vaporetto came down, that fate can be heavier-footed than any middle-aged barrister.
Chapter Two
The trouble hit us only a couple of days later – and, as it happened, immediately after Freddie had been introduced to my family.
He came to lunch with us and was charming. Nevertheless the occasion wasn’t wholly a success. The responsibility for this lay superficially with my eldest daughter, Mary. But more radically it lay with Freddie Seston himself – or rather not with Freddie Seston but with Hugo St Swithin. Hugo St Swithin was the outlandish pseudonym under which Freddie published his romances.
Mary – what I hadn’t at all realised – was a St Swithin fan. She had read at least half of his books, and I got the impression that this meant a round dozen. Her excitement on hearing that St Swithin was to be produced in the flesh was marred only by a sense of shame at not yet having got round to the remaining twelve. But awe didn’t make her in the least tongue-tied – she hadn’t now been up at Somerville for a year for nothing – and she attacked Freddie briskly almost as soon as her mother had been allowed a civil innings with him. Mary is ruthless rather than lacking in tact, and her ruthlessness in this encounter took its licence so evidently from a large honest admiration that I didn’t myself see any reason to chip in in a diversionary way. And Freddie was taking it for exactly what it all was. It was, so to speak, Hugo who was uncomfortable.
Let me say at once that I can’t promise a narrative developing at all handsomely on Jekyll and Hyde lines. There was an obvious sense, indeed, in which my late- recovered friend owned a dual personality. But I never, through the whole course of the affair, effectively encountered Hugo. He was a shade – a hovering presence merely. One’s direct contact was with Freddie and with Freddie only, and one was aware of Hugo simply as a background figure intermittently embarrassing to him. Yet I was convinced that Hugo had a very real existence; that when Freddie opened his tape-recorder – an instrument unknown to him in his character as an art-historian – Hugo took over absolute control. That Hugo, thus released, was in the slightest degree answeringly embarrassed by a hovering Freddie seems improbable. One had only to read a single St Swithin book to be convinced of this. Not that they don’t have – for I confess to having read several of them now – a good deal which one feels Freddie to have contributed. Their success, initially at least, was with a cultivated public; and all those that I have looked into present a surface that might have been provided by, say, the art and literature type of Third Programme don. It is all there so fluently and so entirely without a blush that one can’t suppose the slightest domestic trouble to be involved. While Hugo was in control, he could call for help upon a Freddie who didn’t make a murmur; it was only when Freddie was on top, and Hugo’s activities being canvassed, that a faint breath of dispeace became audible.
“Do you plan it all out very carefully beforehand, or do you develop and alter your plot as you go along?”
Mary put this to Freddie in a suddenly relaxed and casual manner which I seemed to remember as that adopted by cunning examiners who have come to the really crucial question in a viva. It was apparent that there was a right and a wrong answer; and I supposed that the wrong answer would be anything claiming or admitting the slightest degree of happy improvisation during the progress of a detective work. But Freddie didn’t seem to find the test at all elementary; in fact, he hedged just as an apprehensive candidate might do. “It’s not terribly easy to say,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know that I’ve a general rule. Sometimes it works out more one way, and sometimes the other. Of course, I always like to have some idea at the start. And there are instances in which it’s more elaborate, and instances in which it’s less so.”
Freddie delivered himself of this with his customary easy vivacity – and looking across the table at Mary as if he were delighted with her both as the very pretty girl she was and as an admirer of his writings. But it would have been clear to any detached observer that he didn’t want to be more than vague. Indeed, one could have suspected that it somehow wasn’t in his power to be anything else. Mary didn’t tumble to this; she felt that the vagueness had been in the manner of her framing her question; and now, like a patient examiner, she started in again. “Take Death Lies Dead, for instance. Did you start off from that marvellous idea about the two photographs, or did that suddenly come to you later as what would explain the whole thing?”
“The two photographs?” Freddie looked quite blank.
“The positive and negative prints – and the man having to choose.”
“Yes, of course. But it was rather a long time ago, that one. I don’t, as a matter of fact, remember much about it.”
“Then what about Dead on the Hour? I’ve sometimes wondered if you really cheated there.”
“Cheated?” Not unreasonably, I thought, Freddie appeared distressed by this suspicion.
“Didn’t you change your mind about what Lord Ormont’s butler actually hid in the wine-cooler?”
“That’s very acute of you,” Freddie gave Mary his most engaging smile. “Because I imagine there’s little doubt that you’re right.”
“What did he hide?” It was my second daughter Margaret who chipped in with this. I remember its instantly crossing my mind that perhaps she ought to be called to the Bar. The acutest barrister could not have pounced more effectively. It was true that Margaret was abetted by Mary, who ought herself to have supplied an answer to the question when it became evident that Freddie was entirely at a loss. As it was, the resulting moment seemed, in an absurd and trifling way, uncomfortable. Freddie Seston was unmistakably no good with Hugo St Swithin’s fans. If the St Swithin stories were what they sounded to be – replete with lords owning butlers owning wine-coolers – perhaps the trouble lay in Freddie’s feeling that this old-fashioned stuff made him a bit of a back number. Or perhaps, I began to conjecture, Freddie felt it all rather undignified.
There was a little further talk about Dead on the Hour – I can’t say that the plot became at all clear to me – and then Mary mercifully gave over. But it wasn’t before I’d reflected that, had our guest been an elderly writer of what are called “straight” novels, she wouldn’t have dreamed of tackling him as she had done. It was, in a way, one up to Freddie – or Hugo – that his writing should thus provoke eager and equal challenge in the young. And “challenge” was the significant word. The writer of a mystery story, I suppose, is inviting his reader to a battle of wits. It is almost a matter of what the theatre people call “audience participation”. And when the reader actually gets hold of his author – as Mary had on this occasion done – then the reader has a n
atural expectation that both the battle and the participation should proceed. There was a case, I felt, for its being regarded as a healthier relationship than most in the entertainment world – which was presumably the world in question. Only Freddie didn’t seem easy with it. And I found that my sympathies were with Mary over the present encounter. Freddie was charming. But he refused to play.
The talk turned to other things. We discussed the Biennale, which was happening that year, and Freddie treated us to a substantially informative but nevertheless entertaining disquisition on the present state of painting in the Latin-American countries. It occurred to me that he would make an excellent Slade Professor of Fine Art in our old university. I ventured to express this view – and was greeted with a shout of Freddie’s most uninhibited laughter. He had done his turn as that, it seemed, some years ago. I was suitably chastened in my ignorance, and Freddie bubbled over with pleasure at my discomfiture. He had a streak of vanity, I saw, which was innocent and almost pleasing. Moreover – I again noted – he wasn’t a bore. The Biennale had educed the information that Judy, my youngest daughter, was an art student. Judy had sat throughout our luncheon in her customary glowering silence, with no apparent interest in the world save that of gloomily yet efficiently twirling her pasta round the prongs of her fork. But now Freddie instantly got hold of her, and within minutes they were scandalously employed together with pencils upon the not entirely spotless tablecloth of our pensione. I didn’t gather what precisely it was about, but I think he showed her, quite shamelessly, how to cheat in some tedious problem of perspective. Then they had a serious discussion. Again I didn’t follow it – but its formula seemed to be that, if Judy was principally interested in d and p, then she ought first to have a short sharp go at g, and thereafter entirely concentrate for some years upon w. I don’t know whether it is significant that, whereas both Mary and Margaret had entirely forgotten about Freddie Seston within a twelvemonth of their meeting, he remained a great light of Judy’s indefinitely.
But when Freddie had departed, it was Mary and Margaret who fell to a vigorous discussion of him. The good rule that guests are not thus to be anatomised hard upon the door’s closing behind them has not, I am sorry to say, been incorporated in my daughters’ code of manners. But, equally, I must confess that my wife and I would have lost a good deal of entertainment over the years if it had.
“The man’s a fraud,” Margaret said. “It’s just one more case of Daddy’s being taken in. It’s another case of the man with the carpets.”
Judy, who had relapsed into her austere gloom, was roused by this to laughter. It is a response which mention of the man with the carpets never fails to elicit in my family. “Rubbish!” she then added. “Mr Seston was at Oriel with Daddy. And he’s a most distinguished critic.”
“Oh, he may be that. I mean he’s a fraud about those detective stories Mary’s cracked on. He knows nothing about them. I suppose he once wrote a successful one himself, and has had all the rest written by a ghost. Isn’t that the word? And he hasn’t even bothered to read them. Pretty cool, I’ll say.”
“Didn’t you like Freddie?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s very attractive. That’s how he’s got away with his monstrous deception.”
“How utterly absurd!” Mary was indignant. “Of course he writes the St Swithin stories. His own name appears on the back of the title-pages. ‘Copyright by Frederick Seston.’ So there’s no secret about it.”
“Then he’s not all that attractive. Pretending to be so vague about books he’s really written is a shocking affectation.”
“It’s probably modesty.” Mary offered this defence without much conviction. “Mummy, what do you think?”
My wife, as usual, had her thoughts in an admirable state of clarity. “Mr Seston is reasonably modest. And that might make him reluctant to talk about his own books – particularly, Mary, at the point of your gun.
But it ought not to make him dissimulate a reasonable knowledge of them. There must be another explanation. Perhaps when he is away from that sort of thing – here in Venice and absorbing himself in his painters – his detective stories rather fade from his mind. It’s not a state of affairs I quarrel with. I find him very nice.”
“I think,” I said, “your mother’s right – but that it’s something more specific than she supposes. Whatever appears on the back of those title-pages, there’s probably a valid psychological sense in which the books are not precisely by Freddie Seston. They play no part in his life, and don’t affect it in any way—”
“Unless,” my wife said, “one counts being able to stay at Danieli’s.”
“Quite so. But the novels – or whatever they are to be called – are the product of intense bouts of being Hugo St Swithin, and it’s quite reasonable that there should be a certain dissociation of personality involved – enough of it, at least, to account for Freddie’s remembering unnaturally little about the stuff. But the process quite stops short of being pathological. He can talk about the books reasonably enough. It’s only when he’s badgered about their detail that he seems to get confused.”
Margaret shook her head. “I think he’s not quite happy when they’re mentioned at all. He’s ashamed of them. If he’s a case of warring personalities, then it’s a bit of a class war. Freddie, I’m afraid, is rather ashamed of Hugo. It’s as simple as that.”
“But could he be?” my wife asked. “I don’t know the books, but we’ve Mary’s word for it that they’re very good of their kind.”
I laughed at this. “We’ve other words than Mary’s. It’s still true – although it was perhaps truer twenty years ago – that detective stories are much read by tremendously distinguished persons. And I’ve a notion that the Hugo St Swithin’s would have a respectable position on their list. So it isn’t reasonable that Freddie should be ashamed of them.”
“That’s not an adequate analysis.” Margaret assumed her best forensic manner. “Those top people who read thrillers aren’t the literary and artistic crowd. They’re judges and big-wig lawyers and doctors and so on: what you might call all the high-powered Philistines. Now, your Mr Seston, Daddy, is chiefly in on art, isn’t he? Well, it was evident from the way he was jawing at Judy. So perhaps what worries him is that his stories aren’t seriously regarded by his own sort of person.”
“But they aren’t seriously regarded by anybody,” my wife said. “Not even by Mary. And Mr Seston is demonstrably sane. He can’t feel uneasy because Dead on the Hour isn’t War and Peace or The Magic Mountain.” She paused and reached for her guide-book. “I think it had better be the Scuola di San Rocco this afternoon. Un grandioso scalone dello Scarpagnino … but of course he may feel uneasy because Dead on the Hour and the rest of them don’t try to be serious.”
I got to my feet – a shade reluctantly, since I was in process of rediscovering that the obligatory sights of Venice are as exhausting as they are virtually inexhaustible. “Yes,” I said, “that’s probably as near as we’ll get to Freddie at the moment. But at least we needn’t commiserate with him. He may put in time desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope. He may feel a little sad at making himself a motley to the view. But I can’t think his sorrows go deep. And to have Venice at one’s command,” here I verified the position of the Scuola di San Rocco on my map, “not as a tripper but for months on end; to be able to woo Carpaccio’s St Ursula with world enough and time—”
I had got so far in what were possibly rather rambling remarks when the pensione’s ancient porter interrupted me. I was wanted on the telephone. I made my way to it with foreboding, for I could suppose only that it meant a call from London and a summons there for urgent consultation.
But it was only about the urgency of the message that I was right. The voice at the other end of the line was Freddie’s. “Jonathan?” it said. “Jonathan, for God’s sake come round here at once.”
Chapter Three
When I got to Freddie’s hotel I found that he had just move
d into a private suite. Money from his stories must have been coming to him pretty freely for a good many years, and he had developed almost a rich man’s instinct for using it in a crisis. But this prompt act, and the equally prompt contacting me on the telephone, appeared to have drained the barrel so far as Freddie’s present store of self-possession went. He was in a condition of bewildered helplessness the dire extent of which didn’t in the least appear to be a product of the disposition I had noted in him to play himself up. His pallor of itself would have told me that something really serious – or something that Freddie felt to be really serious – had occurred.
We weren’t alone. Freddie’s somewhat lavishly gilded retreat contained also a middle-aged man with an indefinable air of having stepped straight out of a London cab. I had indeed an incongruous image of him coming down the Grand Canal in a gondola, with his respectable dark-grey soft hat on his head, and at his feet what was at his feet now: the sort of briefcase to which is attached, like a conjoint twin, a zip-fastened receptacle designed to hold a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush. It struck me at once that he belonged to what might be called, broadly, the investigating classes; and professional instinct prompted me – irrelevantly, as it was to prove – to consider Freddie in his just conceivable aspect as an elusive surtax payer.
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 3