Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  Jesus Christ. I shivered. This was too creepy.

  And what was it all saying then, this installation? Use your wits! What was the concept? Who was the murderer? And—just as important—who was Mr. Black, the victim?

  Miss Pink would not be a victim, I realised, despite my sense of victimisation. She would be a suspect. She was one of the characters moving, step by step, room by room, to some dim awareness of what was going on, of whom she was with, and why.

  Mr. Black was the victim, always. Who killed Mr. Black?

  Mr. Black.

  I could have screamed.

  No. He wouldn’t have. He didn’t.

  But if he did?

  “Then I’ve slept with a murderer!” I said aloud.

  He was waiting downstairs.

  I ran. Quickly I opened the panel into the secret passageway, and found a narrow, dark spiral staircase winding down, which brought me into the empty kitchen, where there was a knife holder with a variety of perfect murder weapons staring at me from the marble surface. I raced through this room, and down a corridor to the entrance hall, and confronted a portrait of an 18th-century male Coyman ancestor in wig and blue sash eyeing me imperiously, discombobulated that I would suspect a descendant of his of any misdemeanour. I tore into the drawing room, where my black box was still sitting on the table, and picked it up, this tiny coffin, under the gaze of Edward Prain’s mother.

  Mr. Black. My work.

  Had I allowed Edward Prain to be a murderer? If so, there was no secret mystery about it. There was no investigation. It had happened right in front of my eyes, and I’d wanted it. No, not exactly. I’d wanted feedback. Feedback! If you were a foreigner, you’d think that word meant “vomit.”

  “I accuse Mr. Cream of murdering Mr. Black in the drawing-room, with his tongue!”

  The lawnmower started up outside.

  Whirring things shot around my brain.

  Had he lied about my novel? Had he murdered it in front of me? But it should have lived. It should have been celebrated. He should have told me it was brimming with vitality, and worth bringing out into the open. Instead he had stuck a knife into it.

  Was this true? Was I imagining this?

  I tried to think clearly, to use reason. Let’s just say he thought highly of my novel. Would admitting his admiration have fitted in with his proposal, his strategy? How could he possibly have said he liked it, when if he had said he thought it would be perfect for Coymans and a real seller there would be no reason for him to present me with such an alluring offer? That would close things rather than open them, because then I would have trusted I could have that thing I wanted—publication—without any special extra time. He had to deride it, while still giving me enough praise to indicate I had talent. If he had said, “Stella, I love this. It’s brilliant and engaging, and it could sell well,” I would have had the impetus I needed to keep going, as I was, and the confidence that I could make my “£500” and still have the room of my own, where I could remain my own person, independent, not wrapped up in some scheme of his making. It was about power. If he told me this one was inadequate, but that I could make the grade next time after his patronage, given all that time I would have writing away at Walton Hall, I would be much more compliant. And then he could always change his mind about the first one in due course. It didn’t have to be the last judgement. He wouldn’t be losing a product. He could say his opinion had been wrong—he was not the Delphic oracle. He would publish it later.

  “Stella?”

  He was standing in the doorway, now in a blue-grey suit, immaculate.

  “Ah,” I jumped.

  “What?” he asked, baffled.

  “You—” I said. How could I put it? J’accuse! “You liked my novel.”

  He put on a mild expression of reassurance. “I told you it was quite good.”

  I stared at him then, stared at him hard. I tried to burrow into his brain. How can you tell if someone is lying? He held my stare confidently, and then there was a very slight pursing of his lips and setting of his jaw: a preparation for a battle.

  “No. No. You really liked it. You thought it was very good. But you decided to kill it, because that was your strategy.”

  He looked at me tightly.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s imagine this. You needed to give me just enough encouragement to want time and space to write so that I could prove myself to you. If you’d said you wanted the novel, why would I need you? I could keep going as I was before. I’d cut out some of my activities, but I’d stay in London. For your offer to be really tempting, you had to knock me back, because you calculated, knowing me, that I would want to show you how good I could be, and soon. Give me the space and time, and I’d come up with something you’d just love. And that’s exactly the feeling I was left with. I wanted to sock it to you, to prove I was incredible. If you’d said you wanted my novel, I don’t think I would have felt the same way.”

  “Really, Stella. Do you think I’d do that?” he said, calmly. Calmly.

  No, he should not be calm, faced with such an extraordinary accusation, I realised. He should be shocked! Or amused. He should laugh out loud, or be horrified and sad, or sigh frustratedly at my peculiarity. He should be insulted. What an outrageous thing to suggest. He should be anything but CALM.

  “My God,” I said. “How clever.”

  It’s true, I thought. This is what he has done, and, in his opinion I’ve written a very good novel. Who cares about the 19 literary agents who hadn’t looked at it properly! That was just a result of the market saturation he had told me about at the very start. Agents were swamped. It had gone into slush piles, and they had never even read the pages I had sent. Even if it took my sending it to 25, 40, 100 agents, sooner or later one of them would probably pick it up, and then I would be seriously on the road in my career as a writer. Or I’d send the novel to small publishers who didn’t necessarily require work to be sent via an agent. He knew that. He had to kill it so I wouldn’t keep trying, so that it would be his baby, lying in waiting once he had got what he wanted from me.

  “I told you I expected it to be much better than it was.”

  “But that isn’t true. You wanted me to accept your offer, and it was better I sat there disappointed, but with hope, than sated with praise and reassurance. You are a tactical player. That’s what you do. You lied. You pretended you thought my novel had major problems, when it doesn’t.”

  His face was blank. He was, for a moment, unmoving, as if I had now turned him to stone.

  And then he said, “You are a writer, always searching for truth.”

  “I’ve found it, haven’t I?”

  He peered at me, long and hard, thinking.

  Then he slowly walked over to where I was standing, clutching my black box, and stood there for a moment in front of me in silence, still showing no expression on his face at all.

  And then he said, quietly, “Your novel is very good. It doesn’t matter about the simple plot, because you have such perceptiveness in the way you create your characters that one becomes utterly convinced of their reality, and you manage to move the reader deeply, cutting to the truth about the human heart, even in that tawdry environment you describe. You work out what is important and don’t waste time on what is not. There were a few areas of padding, but these could be dealt with by one of my expert editors very easily. You speak to everyone, because your subject is universal and timeless: love, and how easily it is lost.”

  I stood there feeling vacant, hollow.

  “And I know what you’re going to say now,” he said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  He smiled sadly. “Precisely.”

  “We have to go to the station, don’t we, or we’ll miss the train and you’ll be late for your meeting,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Right then,” I said, marching past him and out of the door.

  chapter eleven | the car

  Monique brought the dar
k red Porsche to the front of the house, and left it there with its engine running. She came into the foyer and pleasantly said goodbye with a certain detachment that gave no intimation of our conversation in the kitchen. Despite it being, undoubtedly, obvious that I wanted to tear Edward limb from limb, she seemed determined to be friendly and composed, as if all that had taken place had very little to do with her, and she were merely an amiable, disinterested onlooker. I went through the motions of a goodbye like a mechanical doll.

  Only when I drew away from the farewell did her eyes show some tinge of concern, perhaps after she had fully comprehended the import of her patron’s expression. But she did not know of his deceit in regard to my novel, that I was sure of. She had trusted that he would give an honest appraisal of my work.

  I turned back to her.

  “By the way, Monique, have you ever won a game of chess with Monsieur Prain?”

  Monique seemed slightly confused by this question and glanced at Edward, who was looking at the floor.

  “Occasionally,” she said.

  “Right. How good of him to let you win sometimes, so you won’t lose interest.”

  With that comment I strode outside.

  Edward Prain followed, after murmuring something in French to Monique that I believe was meant to be reassuring.

  The car door on my side was open, and I seated myself, closed it, put my box and bag at my feet, and did up my safety belt. He put his briefcase on the back seat. We drove off down the driveway, through the wrought-iron gates flanked with stone pineapple-topped pillars, and into the road.

  This small burst of activity seemed a bit much. I felt as if some minor surgical operation had been performed, and that the anaesthetic was now wearing off. There was a part of me too tender to touch. I needed rest and relaxation.

  Driving along a road with someone when you have just had a serious confrontation and have decided with absolute certainty that you never want to have anything whatsoever to do with that person ever again for the rest of your life is not a comfortable experience. I was resolved to be utterly mute. I was not going to say anything to him. I would not reply to anything he said. I would turn myself off. I had every right to be seriously offended. I HATED HIM.

  It is at such a time that I really wish some fantasy would take me off into never-never land, away from the vortex of destruction, but instead it seems to be a rule that whenever I am extremely angry I cannot go anywhere at all but the present, and be exceedingly present in the present at that. I noted the shape of the dashboard, and the cleanness of the windows, an insect that had splattered underneath the windscreen wipers, and the way I was swallowing too much.

  He sighed.

  I looked fiercely at a gentle village and hedgerows, a stone church, flowers and ivy, thatched roofs, as the car purred through the countryside. What you need to be staring at during these kinds of rages is graffiti-flourished walls, refuse and skyscrapers. Or machinery: large turbine engines, bulldozers, cranes and the pendula that break up buildings.

  He sighed again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, stiltedly, as if he had only ever had to say these words meaningfully about two times before in his life and they did not sound right.

  I said nothing. I thought—huh, if he thinks I am going to say, “I forgive you, perfectly understandable under the circumstances” then he has got another thing coming. Bastard.

  I flicked a derisive glance at him, and noted that I had folded both my arms and my legs so that I was in a tight knot.

  He had slept with me, having lied about my novel. He was so manipulative, and then … he let me … and he … for God’s sake!

  I looked across at him again. His hands were fixed firmly on the steering wheel, and he was frowning. He glanced across at me, and I looked away.

  We passed a pleasant country scene of geranium pots around a cross in a village green.

  Oh this was so awful.

  Any kind of fantasy will do, I thought. Think of something else.

  I managed to put a picture of my laptop computer in view. There was something very comforting about my old Apple, bought when I had the cash, when I first started life modelling. There it was, still running fine on its Word 6 programme, with its limited range of fonts and facilities, and its tendency to do a strange jump on the page, which increased my chances of typographical errors but did create interesting juxtapositions that could be useful, especially in poems. I thought of my laptop vengefully, because I resolved that the moment I got back home I would write out an account of every single thing that had happened between myself and Edward Prain, not for publication to satisfy a market, or for the purposes of super-literature, but simply as an incriminating record that, one day, at the appropriate time, would explode in his face like a bomb. So much for him not wanting a “reputation.” Ha. Just you wait.

  He had actually liked my novel. He thought it was very good! And he’d butchered it.

  I looked at him again, tight and sullen, driving the car.

  I sighed.

  He was sorry. He was sorry. For what exactly? He had so much to be sorry about where the hell would he start?

  “How could you tell?” he asked, crashing through my silent vitriol.

  Tell that he was lying? How could I explain?

  Stony-voiced, I said, “Because Walton Hall is the Cluedo house, and someone had to murder Mr. Black.”

  After a moment of puzzlement, he chortled, and then consternation and astonishment appeared to fight a duel over which would be the dominant response.

  Then he said, incredulously, “So it was purely intuitive?”

  Of course it was intuitive. You wouldn’t get Miss Marple or Poirot deciding on the culprit—and the victim—on the basis of a game of Cluedo, for God’s sake. It didn’t constitute empirical deduction. It was not sophisticated rationalising. How else would I have known? Reason followed, but imagination had driven me to the truth already. Maybe I shouldn’t answer, I thought. I had said enough, and broken my vow of silence.

  “Extraordinary,” he said.

  We passed through a tea-caddie hamlet. He raised his hand to a pedestrian, who looked rather pleased at being noticed, and waved. Edward would be well-known here, I thought: the wealthy land-owner. People would note the passing of his car, and feel flattered to be greeted. The country squire. The lord of the manor. Bloody feudal dictator thinking he could wrap everyone around his little finger!

  “You are the most despicable, unprincipled, deceitful, supercilious, emotionally-stunted, twisted, manipulative, depraved, exploitative, controlling, decadent …”—at this point I paused for breath, sensing I was sounding like an entry from Roget’s Thesaurus, which should now insert the word “Prain-like” under the heading for “devious”—“puffed-up, conceited, misguided, perverted …”—I paused again, recognising the need for a noun—“… lying rat.”

  He said nothing and stared ahead.

  Then I added, “Never in my life have I met anyone remotely like you.”

  “That feeling is, at least, entirely mutual,” he said, hoarsely.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked, like a school-teacher.

  “As you indicated. It was a strategy.”

  He had to win. That was all that mattered. “Puh!” I puffed. “Is that how you live your life?”

  “It’s how I run my business.”

  “Is life a business?”

  He clenched his hands on the wheel so tightly his knuckles were white and you could see the hand-bones reaching up to his wrists. I noticed there was a protruding blue vein running from the edge of his left eyebrow through his temple, like a miniature river swelling its banks.

  “You could lie to my face and then make love with me,” I stated.

  “Yes,” he said, coldly now. “I could do that. I don’t think I ever led you to believe I was Prince Charming. This is not a fairy tale.”

  Ouch. I had a sudden flash of my collection of stories I had wistfully entitled “Tales of L
ong Ago and Far Away.” Perhaps I did find it too easy to see him as the handsome prince, with me as the Cinderella, in his sumptuous palace. I had wanted him to be a hero, even when his strange offer surely indicated he was not quite the ideal. In the kitchen, he had himself fretted—losing his appetite—and suggested that we should not be lovers. The deal was more important to him than I was. The effigy.

  What was I thinking?

  He had trashed my novel and I had taken the blow on the chin, like a boxer, ready to stand up and fight the good fight at the next opportunity. And perhaps making love with him was part of my warrior instinct. I had marched up the steps to his bathroom composing a poem that would sock it to him, and when I found him with Monique’s cardigan in hand I had faced him with all my sexuality blazing, recognising my own truth, and goddamn it I let him have it, that deceitful bastard. I had let him have the truth of me and my feelings. So he had risen to the challenge with all his lies and armour still intact. Well bully for him. With all that ripped off, now, what was he? He was just a weaselling shit.

  “Stop the car!” I commanded, as a general to the troops.

  He kept driving.

  “I want to leave this car,” I demanded. “Let me out.”

  “In the middle of nowhere?”

  I glared at a pretty wood of trees to my left, dappled with sunlight and reminiscent of an Alfred Sisley painting. “This is perfectly fine. I can hitch a ride to the station. I don’t have to be in London for an important meeting. I can take all day if I have to. I would rather walk. Or are you planning on keeping me captive? Am I not allowed to leave your car? Do you still expect me to play the part of Little Miss Obedient?”

  Pure hyperbole. And I didn’t care.

  He indicated left, braked, and pulled to a gentle halt along the grassy verge.