He now lived alone in a flat in Pimlico. In the evenings he would sometimes dine out with his friends; but more often he would eat alone because most of those he had thought were his friends had sided with his wife. This treachery was something which reinforced Simon’s pessimistic view of human nature. Sarah, his wife, had been what was once called ‘the guilty party’ – running off to England with a young geologist she had met in Saudi Arabia, suing for divorce, obliging Simon to sell her his share of their house in Kew as part of the settlement; and now living there with her lover, keeping Simon’s children, and entertaining Simon’s friends.
He had heard from his sister – who had never liked Sarah – that these friends – these false friends – would justify their preference for his former wife not just by praise of her wit and her cooking, but by dark remarks such as ‘it takes two to tango’. He had also heard it said that behind his ‘superficial charm’ there was cruelty and coldness; that his handsome and youthful appearance and easy, sardonic sense of humour concealed a destructive cynicism, a self-indulgent melancholy, a calculating egoism: yet the only substantiation ever produced in these discussions of his character came from one of the circle who had stayed with the Milsons in Jedda, who told the story of how Simon had refused to speak to Sarah for a whole day because she had given him a broken fried egg for his breakfast.
For a time after the divorce Simon had gone out with other women, but it was only for form’s sake. Never quite as lecherous as a modern man is meant to be, the rupture with his wife had doused what remained of his desire. He felt angry with all women for the harm done to him by one, and looked upon their bodies as baited traps. There were plenty of unattached women of the right age who were happy to go out with him, but with icy courtesy he kept his distance. In time, of course, these ladies – even those as lustless as he was – felt injured that he did not make a pass; so to save himself the embarrassment, and the women the humiliation, Simon now spent most evenings eating alone in front of the television – fish fingers or fry-ups with the egg invariably broken.
For lunch he usually went to the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall, which since his divorce – and without an overseas allowance – had become an extravagance but was necessary all the same to his self-respect. His father had worked hard in the dull business of manufacturing office furniture to give his son a good education – by which he had meant a public school and Cambridge University. He had been proud when Simon had got into the Foreign Office, and although he was now dead, it was in deference to his father’s wishes that Simon continued as best he could to lead the life of an English gentleman.
A club, like an umbrella, seemed to Simon a necessary appurtenance for this life. Perhaps because he had been serving abroad at the time, he had never been affected by the democratic spirit which had swept over English manners and morals in the 1960s, leaving dukes in jeans and debutantes in dungarees. He even looked askance at those of his friends in the Foreign Office who wore corduroy blousons in their spare time to demonstrate their commitment to the Common Market. Simon dressed as he had always dressed – in grey, pin-striped suits during the week, and in tweed jackets and twill trousers at the weekend. He liked to think that the people he mixed with – particularly those in the Travellers’ Club – dressed in the same way, and was therefore irritated, one day in the early summer of 1979, as he sat drinking a glass of vermouth before lunch, to see a man of around his own age wearing an open-necked shirt and a sky-blue suit.
The man was slim with blonde hair, and he had on his boyish face the kind of selfconscious, flirtatious expression which Simon associated with homosexuals. He therefore looked away from this offensive intruder just as the intruder raised his plucked eyebrows and crossed the room towards him. To his horror Simon realized that this technicoloured pansy had been in his house at school.
‘Aren’t you Milson?’ he was asked. ‘Simon Milson?’
‘Yes.’ Simon half-rose from his leather chair.
‘You probably don’t remember me. We were at school together.’
Simon stood up altogether. ‘Of course …’
‘Fifteen, no, almost twenty years ago.’ He spoke in a soft voice with a trace of an American accent.
‘Yes. You’re Hope, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right. Charlie Hope.’
Simon did remember Hope, the pretty boy of his year, but he was reluctant to renew the acquaintance of someone in an open-necked shirt and sky-blue suit who, he now realized, was lunching with one of the Club’s better-known queers. It was not his style, however, to snub anyone so he listened as Charlie Hope babbled on as if it was only a month or so since they had met. He said he was in films or advertising or films for advertising and had just come back from Los Angeles where he now lived ‘on and off’. ‘And what do you do?’ he asked Simon. ‘Didn’t you go into the FO?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve been abroad a lot.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Divorced.’
‘Really?’ He looked almost pleasantly surprised. ‘No one in LA stays married for long, but I thought that over here …’
‘The wave of the Californian future has even reached our shores,’ said Simon caustically, glancing at the naked throat of his former friend.
Charlie Hope laughed nervously. ‘Marry late,’ he said. ‘That’s my advice.’
‘And do you intend to take it?’ asked Simon with a trace of malice in his voice.
Charlie returned a bland, almost innocent smile. ‘Yes. I’m getting married in November.’
Simon winced in anticipation of some reverent description of a gay betrothal, but to his astonishment Charlie said: ‘She’s divorced too.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Carmen.’
‘Any children?’
‘No, thank God. I wouldn’t want someone else’s kids.’
‘And you’re actually getting married?’ asked Simon incredulously. ‘Is it back in fashion in California?’
Charlie blushed. ‘Not really, no, but it makes it simpler for her to come over here, and for me to go over there. You know, visas and that sort of thing.’
The effete old man who had brought Charlie Hope into the Club looked sourly at Simon, as if to say this conversation had gone on long enough; so the two school friends exchanged telephone numbers, although on Simon’s part this was only a formality. He had no intention of looking Hope up, nor did he imagine that his pin-striped suit would appeal to Hope’s laid-back life-style, but just before he moved away, Charlie dropped the transatlantic twang which he must have picked up in Los Angeles and said in just the tone he would have used at school: ‘I say, Milson, do you remember Ludley?’
‘Willy? Yes. Why?’
‘I’m going to see him.’
‘Where?’
‘In the South of France.’
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘Drinking. That’s why I’m going out. I got a kind of SOS.’
‘From him?’
‘No. From Priscilla.’
‘Is that his wife?’
‘Yes. I assume so. Unless it’s a case of Kenya.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Didn’t they used to say: “Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?”’
‘Did they?’ Simon did not understand what Charlie was talking about, but the host was restless and so was Simon’s stomach so he simply said: ‘Well give him my regards.’
‘You should go and see him. I think he’s short on friends.’
‘Yes, well, I will if I’m down that way.’ Simon smiled and moved towards the door. The others stayed in the bar while he went through to the dining-room; but as he left his table after lunch he saw Charlie Hope tête-à-tête with the old bugger over strawberries and cream, and noticed that he had been made to put on a tie.
TWO
Simon Milson had not only known William Ludley at school, he had loved and admired him with the fervour a boy of thirteen can feel f
or another boy four years older. When Simon had been in the fourth form, Ludley had been top of the school – Head Boy, Captain of Cricket and star of the Scholarship Sixth. Nor had Simon worshipped him from a distance, because it was part of Ludley’s charm for the younger boys that he descended among them, told them to call him Willy, and shared with them the lofty thoughts that were passing through his mind.
It was Willy, for example, who had convinced Simon that there was no God. ‘How can anyone with a knowledge of the comparative history of religions retain an exclusive belief in the tenets of any particular sect?’ Since Willy had read the Bible and the Koran, Simon and his friends accepted this verdict on the High Anglicanism they were taught at school. Willy then went on to read Nietzsche and taught his young disciples a contempt for the Christian religion. They went to chapel with a sneer on their lips, thought that Willy was Nietzsche’s superman, and envied Charlie Hope, who had long eyelashes and pretty lips, and was the one Willy chose to take on walks in the woods.
Willy had already left when Simon followed him to Cambridge, but there too he had left a legend – not on the cricket field or in the classroom but in the high jinks fashionable at the end of the 1950s. The undergraduates still talked of Ludley’s parties, Ludley’s claret, Ludley’s girls. He was said to have come up with his own hunter and groom; to have lost three hundred pounds in one evening playing poker at Kings; to have seduced the daughter of a College chaplain; and to have kept quarter-bottles of Krug in his bathroom to rinse out his mouth after brushing his teeth – meanwhile calling himself a Marxist and affecting the views of the extreme Left.
Despite this chaotic debauchery, Willy Ludley had won First Class Honours in history. He did just as well in the Civil Service Examinations, applied to join the Foreign Office and was accepted at once. He spent a year in London and was then posted to Djakarta. It was in this period that Simon lost track of what he was doing, and after a year or so he never bothered to enquire. All at once the spirit at Cambridge had changed. Simon and his friends had started to read Marcuse and Frantz Fanon, and were embarrassed by the well-thumbed copies of Brideshead Revisited still standing on their shelves. Instead of discussing debutante dances in London they argued about the likely effects of the Selective Employment Tax and the American involvement in Vietnam. William Ludley was still remembered, but from long ago, as if he had been there in the 1920s, not the 1950s. When Simon came down from Cambridge and went into the Foreign Office, he was hardly aware that he was doing what Willy had done. He did not ask where he was and heard quite by chance that he had gone to Djakarta, then resigned from the service and now lived in Argentina. Meeting Charlie Hope in the Travellers’ Club and hearing that Willy Ludley had returned to Europe and was now living in the South of France did not make Simon want to see either of them again. He threw Charlie’s telephone number into the waste-paper basket as soon as he had finished the packet of small cigars upon which he had written it down; but around two months later, at the beginning of September, he received a letter with a French stamp and the postmark of the Alpes Maritimes.
The engraved address at the top of the paper was The Villa Golitsyn, Boulevard de Cambrai, 06200 Nice; and the letter beneath, written in a firm, girlish hand, read as follows:
Dear Mr Milson,
Charlie Hope, who is at present our guest here in Nice, mentioned that you might like to come and stay with us for a week or two later this month. We would of course be only too pleased if you could come. Will has often spoken of you. He has fond memories of you from your school days together, and I should like to make your acquaintance.
With best wishes,
Priscilla Ludley
This curiously old-fashioned letter was followed on the same day by a telegram from Nice. PLEASE COME STOP NEED HELP STOP CHARLIE. Simon’s first inclination was to ignore them both. He felt irritated by both the invitation and the plea from people who were stretching the meaning of the word if they still thought of him as a friend. At best he might write a letter to say that he had no more leave. But as he sat eating a home-made bacon sandwich in front of Hawaii Five-O, the idea of a week or two in the South of France began to have its attractions. First, the only holiday he had taken that year was a week on the Norfolk Broads with his two children. It had been a fiasco. They had been bored, polite and embarrassed at his incompetence on the boat. His son was only interested in football, and seemed disappointed that Simon knew nothing about it. His daughter kept telling her brother that he would ‘have to ask Steve’ – Steve being the geologist who now lived with their mother. Simon knew that they both longed to go back to Dorset, where all their cousins on Sarah’s side of the family were staying in their grandparents’ country house. He could see them counting the days and the hours they still had to live through before escaping from the holiday chalet.
Simon had four weeks of leave still due to him, and even if he took one of these at Christmas he would have to think of something to do with the other three. He would happily have gone without them if it would not have looked odd to his colleagues in the African department. They knew that he was divorced but not as yet that most of his friends had used it as a pretext to desert him. It was not that Simon was sorry for himself, but he did not want to be pitied – either by his colleagues at the Foreign Office or by his sister and brother-in-law who had asked him to stay at their cottage in Devon. Most of all he dreaded the solicitude of his mother, who lived alone in Kent.
It had occurred to him to take his leave and remain in London incognito, or try and rise from the sexual torpor which had followed his divorce and take some girl to Paris or Amsterdam, but he knew he never would – that he had lost the spirit for that sort of thing and would only stay in his flat eating bacon sandwiches or fish-fingers for lunch as well as supper.
All this in itself was not enough to make him decide to accept the invitation to stay with the Ludleys. What finally tipped the balance in favour of going was the effect he thought it might have on Sarah, his former wife, when it got back to her through the London tittle-tattle that he was staying with rich friends on the Côte d’Azur. The Ludley’s was a famous name and his wife was a snob: the divorce had numbed most of Simon’s feeling but his amour propre had survived.
He therefore made up his mind to go. He wrote to Priscilla Ludley accepting her invitation and told his colleagues at the office where he was going. Thinking that it would be pleasant to travel in old-fashioned style, he booked a First Class berth on the Riviera-Flanders express for the night of 27 September and then sent a telegram to Charlie to say when he would arrive.
THREE
On his last day at work before leaving for France Simon was asked by the Undersecretary to call on Fowler, the head of security. ‘I don’t know what he wants,’ his superior said, ‘but I said you would look in before you went away.’
Simon went up in the middle of the morning and was received in a friendly but slightly embarrassed manner by an upright, older man. He was offered a seat which he accepted and coffee which he refused.
‘I gather that you’re going on leave,’ said Fowler, sitting down in his own chair behind his desk.
‘Yes,’ said Simon.
‘And you’re going to stay with the Ludleys in France.’
‘Yes.’
Simon’s voice must have expressed some of the surprise he felt that Fowler should know where he was taking his holiday, because Fowler made an apologetic gesture and said: ‘I happened to hear …’
‘I knew him at school,’ said Simon.
‘Of course.’
‘And now he’s living in the South of France.’
‘I know.’ Fowler paused. ‘Have you seen much of him since your school days?’
‘No.’
Fowler stood up and turned his back on Simon to look out of the window. Although ten or fifteen years older, he seemed embarrassed and confused by what he wanted to say. He turned to face Simon again, put his hands on the back of his chair, leaned forward and said: �
�Do you know what E. M. Forster said – that one’s first loyalty is to one’s friends?’
‘No. Did he say that?’
‘He’s supposed to have done. Would you agree with it?’
Suspecting now that this was some covert interview for a taxing post, Simon wondered what answer would produce the best impression. Then he thought of his friends, and the way they had betrayed him by entertaining his wife and her lover, and he replied: ‘No. I think other loyalties come before one’s friends.’
‘Family?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course Forster wasn’t married.’
‘And oneself,’ said Simon. He waited deliberately for the apparent egoism of this remark to take effect, and then qualified it by adding: ‘Not oneself in a selfish sense, but in the sense of one’s integrity, one’s professionalism.’
‘Good,’ said Fowler. ‘I agree.’ He sat down, rubbed his face in the palm of his hands, and then said: ‘I only asked about that – about Forster’s axiom – because I’d like you, if you can, to find out something about Ludley.’
‘To find out what?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, but I didn’t want you to think that I was asking you to betray a friend although in a sense I suppose I am.’
‘He’s not a close friend,’ said Simon.
‘I know, but still …’ Fowler looked more discomfited than the younger man. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story, or as much of it as I can. You can always turn me down.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ludley joined us from Cambridge … You were there, too, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t read history?’
‘No. Law.’
‘My own subject. Much more sound. Deals with things as they are. But Ludley, you see, read history – and people who speculate about the past get funny ideas about the future.’
The Villa Golitsyn Page 2