The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  She shrugged, hoping for the appearance of nonchalance; in truth, she couldn’t conceive of a single person in her current life who might suggest The Old Moat as an appropriate venue for a night on the town. Nor anyone, unless she’d very much misjudged the impression they had of her, who might think she’d be open to the suggestion.

  “Who are you here with?” she said.

  “Funny you should ask. I’m here alone myself tonight. Well... perhaps not entirely alone. But certainly amenable to a change of company.”

  He leaned in to her until his mouth was almost level with her ear, drowning out the overlapping conversations and the opening chords of Metal Guru.

  “That chap to your left,” he said, “the one in the grey tank top - don’t look! He’s been following me around all evening, absolutely desperate to catch my eye, and just between us, it’s starting to make me a touch uneasy.”

  Her eyes flicked left, as surreptitiously as she could make them, her peripheral vision taking in the man in the tank-top. He was plain, average-looking; hawk-nosed, face slightly rubbery, thinning hair combed unprepossessingly over his crown. And he was old - at least 35, maybe closer to 40. Not an obvious match at all for the pretty blond boy.

  “I’ve spent the last hour dodging him,” said the boy, “but everywhere I go, there he is, watching! It’s positively sinister.”

  He mock-shuddered.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, though Rose wondered later if he’d been planning to suggest it since he saw her queuing at the bar, “you’d like to be my bodyguard for the night, to help fend him off? Since you’re not here with anyone, and I’m not here with anyone… And who knows?” he added, an impish twinkle in his bright blue eyes. “Maybe he’ll think you’re my girlfriend.”

  The spent the remainder of the night wedged together into a corner by the toilets, Rose leaning for support against a drinks-shelf as sticky as the carpet underfoot. Over the course of three hours of long and meandering discussion, she discovered that the boy, Seb - Sebastian Winchester, Baronet-in-waiting, as he’d dubbed himself with a faux-pompous flourish after his fourth pint - was a second year at Wadham and, like her, was reading History.

  “Not that I could tell you anything about History,” he said. “I expect the barman knows more about Bismarck than I do. I wanted to do English, or go to New York to make films, but the paterfamilias had his own ideas.”

  Seb’s father, Rose understood, had been some kind of newspaper man before his retirement, an influential Citizen Kane type with a substantial inheritance and an aristocratic title regarded as worthless by anyone who actually cared about the peerage. From Seb’s description, he swung to the right of Enoch Powell politically, vehemently and vocally decrying everything from Commonwealth immigration to the necessity of levying taxes.

  “I think it might kill him, if he ever found out about me,” Seb said. “Or he’d kill me. Either way, you can be certain only one of us would come out alive.”

  Once, he told her, during his morning constitutional around his Hertfordshire estate, Winchester Senior had stumbled upon the head gardener - incidentally Seb’s first crush - naked from the waist up and locked in a passionate, Lady Chatterley-style embrace with a male houseguest in the groundskeeper’s cottage. Sir Henry had banished the guest from his home, and immediately thereafter dismissed the gardener, without pay and without a reference - but not before he’d beaten the man almost into unconsciousness with the metal end of his walking stick.

  “Do your parents know about you?” he asked Rose.

  She’d expected the question; had prepared her response in advance.

  “No,” she answered. “But I don’t think they’d mind much. I think they might’ve known a few people, you know… like us.”

  “Gay people,” said Seb. “You can say it, you know. The word won’t bite. So if they wouldn’t mind, why haven’t you told them?”

  “I don’t want to give them any more to worry about,” she said honestly.

  She changed the subject, and Seb let her.

  By closing time, she could have written his biography - schools, boyfriends, the mountain-climbing holiday he was booked to go on over the Christmas break - and they’d made plans to meet for breakfast the following morning.

  ———

  “He adopted me as his best friend more or less thereafter,” Rose told El, pouring them both a second glass of Pinot Noir. “I barely had a say in the matter.”

  They’d moved from the TV room to the kitchen, and something, it seemed to El, had changed between them - or changed in Rose - somewhere along the way. Maybe it was that she was talking about something other than work, El thought; something personal, something other than Marchant. Maybe this was what Rose was actually like, when she wasn’t running a crew.

  She’d even put an ashtray on the table so that El could smoke.

  “Everyone thought we were a couple, of course,” she continued. “Not close friends or any of the people who really knew Seb, but everyone else. And we played along with it, it has to be said - let them all think that we were going out for a candlelit dinner the nights we went to the Moat, or that one of us had stayed over in the other’s room when he’d gone home with a boy, or I’d met a girl. He used to say it was hilarious, the assumptions that people made - that he enjoyed watching them get it all so wrong. But also, I think, we did it because it was easier for both of us to pretend. He wouldn’t have to risk the wrath of Sir Henry with a girlfriend on the scene, and I wouldn’t have anyone asking any intrusive questions or poking around in my private life.”

  “Sure,” El said neutrally. She’d heard variations on Rose’s story a dozen times, a hundred: from women she’d dated, women she’d slept with, women she’d met on the job who’d elected to see her, or the her she’d been that day - the vet, the calligrapher, the wedding planner - as their confessor.

  She hadn’t been expecting to hear it from Rose, admittedly. But she couldn’t say that it had shocked her, either - even if the revelation of her lavender marriage raised yet more questions, added yet another layer of mystery to this job, this setup.

  And if Ruby knew, why hadn’t she said anything - especially when she’d been happy to tell El about Justin D’Amboise’s murder, Leon Baxter’s disappearance, Kat’s stolen casino chips? What made Rose’s secrets so different from anyone else’s?

  “I expect you think Seb was no better than Seymour Henderson,” said Rose. “Saying one thing and doing another. But I can promise you, he wasn’t a hypocrite. He never lied to anyone directly, especially not after he left college and Sir Henry’s grip on him loosened. Everyone who mattered knew about us.”

  “But you stayed married? To each other?”

  “We did. And we were mostly happy together, I think. Obviously it wasn’t a conventional marriage, in the way that word tends to be understood. But I’m sure you know yourself - there’s more than one way to be married to someone. When he asked me, all those years ago… It really wasn’t so hard to say yes.”

  ———

  She hadn’t seen the proposal coming.

  They’d been living together for a year when he asked - splitting the rent on a two-bed flat in Chalk Farm while he got Fairlight Media off the ground and she ran the back-office of a gallery in Bethnal Green. Sir Henry, true to form, was outraged at the cohabitation - though not, as Rose pointed out on the rare occasions the old man had come to visit, as outraged as he would have been, had he been privy to the reality of the arrangement.

  (“I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that your parents never make it down to London,” he’d say in response.

  “I suppose so,” she’d reply, vaguely).

  Seb had just split up with a boyfriend, a theatrical agent with a burgeoning barbiturate problem; she hadn’t had sex, let alone any kind of meaningful relationship, since her final year of university.

  “We should just get married,” he said. They were cooking, chop
ping vegetables for a salad; she was only half-listening to him talk, her attention instead on the radio, where a stoic-sounding woman was reporting on a suspicious fire at a Stepney tower-block.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I said, we should get married. Make all this official.”

  She pulled herself out of the trance the news report had lulled her into; snapped back to the here and now.

  “It wouldn’t work,” she said, deadpan. “A man like you could never stay pinned down to just one woman.”

  “I’m serious.”

  She put down the knife she’d been using to dice the onions.

  “Then you’ve lost your mind. What you’ve just suggested is completely insane.”

  “Is it, though?” he said, with some of the firmness of conviction he adopted in negotiations with the magazine’s backers. “We’re practically married already - look at us.”

  “And you don’t think there might be a flaw or two in your plan?”

  “I’m not asking for fidelity. Or that we sleep together.”

  “Oh, well, in that case...”

  “I want security, Rosie. I want someone to come home to.”

  “You already come home to me. We are, right this second, at home together.”

  “For now. Until you meet some... I don’t know, some tortured artist who makes her own jewellery and keeps her own chickens, and the two of you run off to Brighton together to open a bookshop.”

  “She sounds very busy. Will she even have time for me? Or does she need someone to help her feed the chickens?”

  “I told you, I’m serious! I want to settle down with someone, and you’re the best person I know. The only person I can actually imagine myself growing old with.”

  He was serious, she thought.

  She put her hand on his, gently.

  “Seb, darling,” she said, “you’ll meet someone. I promise. And he’ll be handsome, and kind, and funny, and he’ll love you to death and you’ll love him to death. He’ll be the one you go home to. And I’ll feel like a very poor substitute by comparison.”

  “He won’t be you, though, will he? You’re kind and funny, and I already love you to death. And I know you’re going to bring it up again, that we don’t have sex. But how many married couples do, with each other? And I’d never ask you to hide your mistresses. I’ll invite them over for dinner myself.”

  “And if one of us were to meet someone we wanted to be with, be with properly? Not whatever hypothetical poultry-farming silversmith you’ve already paired me off with - a real person.”

  “Then we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Perhaps we’d have them move in with us, if they wanted to. And we could always get divorced, if we absolutely had to.”

  “You make it sound so reasonable.”

  “Isn’t it, though? People marry for far more mercenary reasons than genuine affection. I’m fairly sure my mother only married my father for his money. Which reminds me - there’s another incentive, too. A more material one. I didn’t mention it before, because... well, frankly I wasn’t sure how you’d react. But you know I had lunch with Father last week?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Right. Well, he... that is, he made me an offer. Said he’d give me a leg-up, plough a bit of capital into Fairlight. Enough to get us on a really even keel.”

  “Oh, Seb! That’s wonderful.”

  “Hold your horses. It is, and it isn’t. It wasn’t a gift - there’s a condition, strings attached. He’ll give me the money - but only if I, and I quote, ‘make an honest woman of you.’ I don’t think he can bear the thought of his son and heir living in sin.”

  She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “We wouldn’t have to lie to anyone,” he continued, filling the silence. “I mean, we’d have to lie to him, obviously - but when has it ever mattered what he thinks? And to your parents too, I suppose. Although... don’t they already think we’re a couple?”

  They did, and he knew it.

  “But as for everyone else, our friends - we’d just tell them we were doing it to keep the old man sweet. They know what he’s like - it’s not as if they’d judge us for it. And in any case - I want to be married to you. I love you. I want you to be my wife.”

  “I don’t want his money,” she said abruptly.

  “And I don’t blame you in the slightest. But what about my money? Would you take that? The amount he’s talking about - it would make an enormous difference to the business. It would take us to another league - me and you, not just Fairlight. We could buy somewhere better than this place, somewhere much more liveable. You could leave the gallery and do something you actually enjoy - I know you hate it there, don’t even try to deny it. And all we’d have to do is slip into our ballgowns and turn up to a party in our honour.”

  “I hate parties.”

  “I know you do. So how about this? Say you’ll marry me, ditch plain old Rosemary Ackroyd for Lady Sebastian Winchester - and you have my word, I’ll never ask you to go to another. You can spend your every waking moment until the day you die buying Old Masters and cataloguing them down in the cellar of your mansion, and I promise you, as a gentleman and a scholar - I’ll never say a thing.”

  ———

  “The wedding was the following February, 1981,” Rose told El. “Sir Henry came through with the money almost as soon as we’d announced the engagement, so by the time we got married, Fairlight was doing well, and we’d bought ourselves a house. This house, in fact. And how’s this for irony? When the wedding actually happened, Seb had already met John, and I’d started seeing Suzie...”

  “John and Suzie?” El asked, recalling the obituary she’d read in the paper: he and Rose honeymooned in the mountain ranges of Denali, Alaska in early 1982, in the company of his best man, barrister John Richmond, and her bridesmaid, the writer Susan Hayes.

  “John was Seb’s partner,” Rose said. “They got together just before the wedding; they were still together when Seb died, though neither of them cared very much for monogamy. And to pre-empt the obvious question: yes, he was fine with the arrangement. He was a junior barrister - a QC, eventually - and he didn’t feel able to come out in chambers. This was the early 80s, remember: the real AIDS crisis hadn’t hit then, it wasn’t really being talked about in this country, but the law was - still is - a very conservative world. He’d have lost clients; possibly lost his job. It was very much in his interests for his lover to be some woman’s devoted husband, rather than a known gay man; it let them hide in plain sight. And we got on famously, which was a lovely bonus. It meant things weren’t too excruciating when he and Seb and I - and Suzie, back then - would all go out for supper, and I’d slip away and leave them to it after the main course.”

  “And Suzie?”

  Rose shook her head.

  “She and I didn’t last,” she said. “Again: not because of Seb. There were no issues there. Suzie was a semi-public figure herself, a children’s author - you’ll have seen her books in the shops, even if you’ve never had cause to buy one. She always said she couldn’t be a lesbian and write the kind of stories she did, for the audiences she did. The press would have eviscerated her. So it suited her very well to be a close friend of the family, or whatever it was they called her.”

  “Here’s another layer of irony for you: children were exactly the reason we separated. Seb and I were always clear that we wanted a child, and John was perfectly happy to be involved in raising Sophie at a remove, as a godfather or an unofficial uncle - we’d always intended to tell her the truth about us all, or some version of it, once she was old enough to grasp the complexities. But Suzie...”

  “Didn’t want kids?”

  “Didn’t even want to be around them. Rather unexpected, given her genre of choice, but there you are. She was fine when Sophie was just an idea; I’m not sure she took it very seriously to begin with. But when we started to talk about clinics and cycles and blood tests... then, I’m afraid, it all became
a little too real for her, and she bolted.”

  “But John stayed?”

  “To the very end. He and I had dinner together the night Seb... the night we found him. Seb had stayed in with Sophie - he’d been feeling ill all day, complaining about dizziness and heart palpitations, but quite honestly, both John and I had been inclined to think he was being a drama queen. He was terrible at being unwell; he was very fit, physically, so it didn’t happen often, but any time he had a cold or a stomach upset, he’d behave as if he’d been stricken with TB or cholera. An absolute Camille of a patient.”

  She smiled again, affectionately, at the thought of him.

  “It was the first night out I’d had in ages - it’s so incredibly difficult to go anywhere when you have children - so I relished it. I had three courses, coffee, a cheese-plate, everything. It was after midnight when we got home. John popped out for a cigarette while I went to check on Sophie, and then the two of us crept up the stairs together to look in on Seb. We’d been drinking with dinner; not an enormous amount, but enough to make us silly, to make us think it would be a scream to sneak up and surprise him in his sickbed. We didn’t even turn on the light as we were creeping into the bedroom. I really wish we had.”

  ———

  His skin was cool. Not cold, exactly, but chilled, reminding her - to her horror and disgust - of the feel of a plate of deli meat, left out on the side for guests to pick over at a buffet.

  He was mostly naked - he always slept naked - but there were socks on his feet, preposterously, as if he hadn’t quite been able to muster the energy to take them off before he fell into bed. No amount of shaking roused him.

  John seemed to understand the truth of it before she did - pulling her away from Seb, away from Seb’s body, as soon as it was obvious that no amount of shaking would help.

  “He’s dead, Rose,” John said, voice flat. “He’s dead. Please, stop.”

  They stood over the body for what felt like hours, clutching at each other like frightened schoolkids.