long. In any case I was pleased that Sarah Langdale had chosen this evening for one of our periodical gatherings in her great-great-great-uncle’s preposterous dining-room. I look forward to these dinners at any time; the food and wine are always excellent, and we’re such a motley company that they can hardly fail to be entertaining. However, tonight would be quite exceptional, for me at least, because one of the men (possibly a woman) eating and drinking and chattering at that huge table, perhaps even at my own elbow, would be the author of the message.
But it would be a good six hours before we all met for pre-dinner drinks in Hector Drummond-Fitch’s Victorian baronial hall, and in the present situation six hours seemed an eternity. I almost prayed I might discover another unaddressed envelope in my letter-box when I returned to Crestcote. Nothing.
So I lay down on my bed, hoping that perhaps I might fall asleep, but of course I only began to consider, one after the other and in meticulous detail, the possible motives of every inhabitant of the place. There’s no more useless occupation; only a fool thinks he can begin to guess what lies in the inner recesses of another person’s mind. Who, looking at me, would imagine that I had killed all those women? No one. Or do I deceive myself? Perhaps I do, and this is certainly not the moment for self-deception.
At forty-five, Laurence Otterey was the oldest of Crackpot Castle’s resident luminaries, thin, even distinguished now that his hair was grey at the sides. His writer’s block was sitting on him like a ton weight, made all the worse because he knew damn well there was a cure to hand: he ought to start again at Page 1 (and he’d reached Page 180!) cutting the bloody brother right out. The fact was, he’d written himself into a corner where Marcus—wrong name too—could only be revealed as a homosexual or in love with his own sister, both of them remedies too corny for consideration.
Lying in bed at midday—he refused to get up when there was nothing to get up for, hence the ’flu story—he wondered whether this was the end of his writing career. And even if it was, what did that career mean when it came down to brass tacks? Good reviews and not much else. ‘Laurence Otterey writes a beautiful spare prose and tells a spare, even classical story … etcetera.’ Sunday Telegraph. ‘Sometimes Otterey seems to stand out, monolithic, as the one and only original voice in today’s mindless literary babel.’ The Times Lit. Supp. He often wished he hadn’t been so bloody well educated.
Laurence had earned his austere literary reputation at twenty-seven, which meant that he’d been supporting it, in and out of marriage, for seventeen years. At the beginning, in the days when he’d honestly believed he was a Very Distinguished Writer, an inflated ego had kept him nicely afloat, but now that he knew he was no such thing, the air had seeped out of the egotistical life-jacket and all the good reviews in the world couldn’t inflate it again.
Not being married wasn’t much fun either. Darling Mary had been fun: until he’d squashed her under the dreadful weight of his writer’s ego, not to mention his eternal absences with that great whore, his work. He missed her; he wished, sometimes desperately, that there was another woman in his life; but the women at Crestcote didn’t appeal to him: Lisa MacDonnell, very beautiful but too strong, too self-sufficient: Sarah Langdale, charming but with a husband who’d knock you flat if you coveted her—despite his own misdemeanours: young Rosamund Turner … well, he’d never been a baby-snatcher, even if she hadn’t been otherwise engaged; besides, he liked Rosamund too much; they had a delightful father-daughter relationship, she found him easy to talk to, had even come to him for advice, and this had flattered him because everybody at Crestcote was her friend.
That left Vicky Lind, no doubt perpetrating at this very moment another of our furry or feathered friends. Pretty, blonde, thirtyish, she did not, alas, have an iota of sex-appeal, and all the men at Crestcote were aware of it. Oh well … no desirable women around, why not a whacking great measure of Scotch, nothing like it?
Vicky Lind was indeed painting: a pair of Northern hares in their winter white, December for next year’s Vicky Lind Nature Calendar, she always liked to get them done six months in advance. That she was, after the first encounter, of no interest to men didn’t worry her in the very least: any more than the fact that her husband had left her, in boredom and frustration, after two years. He had by then performed the only function he was good for, supplying her with a son, her darling Jonathan, at present studying in California. Laurence Otterey was wrong about her age, nearer forty than thirty. Like many another selfish woman, she was in excellent condition, sustained by vanity and her ability to make a great deal of money. This meant that she could afford the best of everything; her Crestcote apartment was a wonder to behold, all pale blue and pink and mauve: ‘I’m an air person, you see, ethereal.’ In her opinion the others lived like pigs; in their opinion she lived like a successful nineteenth-century tart.
She also possessed a chic little mews house in London, within walking distance of Harrods; but for her work, which she took very seriously indeed, it was necessary to spend much time close to the wild creatures which made her such a handsome living. To give Vicky her due, she thought nothing of waiting for hours, sometimes in bitter cold, in order to draw or photograph them. Crestcote, with its security and lack of boring household worries, constituted, as far as she was concerned, a perfect country residence.
Down at The Lodge, Edvard Kusnik was creating Concertante 100, a piece which had been commissioned by the BBC for next year’s Promenade Concerts: pounding his piano, which was electronically linked to the synthesizers, while another battery of speakers relayed the orchestra, recorded yesterday in London at great expense. Various microphones were committing the whole gigantic muddle to tape. Of course he couldn’t hear the postman who had just called, and in any case he sometimes didn’t look in his mailbox for days.
Edvard was thirty-four with curly jet-black hair and a romantic pallor: quite striking, particularly in Israel where he had spent his youth, and where a driving desire for escape had for years done battle with the duties of a good Russian-Jewish son. God, how he loathed that bleak sun-blasted landscape, the backs-to-the-wall enmity with every other country, or so it always seemed, and most of all the bullying moral blackmail which decreed that any talent must be used for the greater glory of the State. To hell with the State!
He didn’t love England, scruffy little hole, any better than Israel, but he did very much love the green peace and quiet of The Lodge at Crestcote House, seeming unaware of the degree to which his composing shattered what he loved. As for the other so-called artists who inhabited the place, they struck him as self-opinionated, ignorant, largely without talent and certainly anti-Semitic, as were the dolorous oafs who lived in the local village. If he were seized from his bed tonight and burned alive it would be no surprise to him.
Of course the dolts at Crestcote couldn’t admit to liking or understanding his music, for by doing so they’d find themselves treating him as an equal; therefore they must denigrate him and it, making uneducated criticisms. And yet … and yet … How could they know that their comments were merely the echo of a malign and bitter fear buried deep inside Edvard Kusnik? Had he, at some point in the past, taken a wrong turning? Music offered so many crossroads and byways and little dark alleys which might lead to magnificent new avenues. Or might not.
Even now as he listened to his own opus, his heart began to sink. It would have sunk a great deal further and faster had he known that his ex-wife, Tamara, was just at that moment coming in at the back door behind him, armed with an ominous suitcase, and unheard of course owing to the numbing din.
Suddenly Edvard leapt up from the piano with a cry, automatically silencing the synthesizers and flipping a switch which killed the orchestra stone dead. A robin could then be heard out in the garden singing his melodic autumn song, Edvard’s atonal noises seemed to encourage them. ‘Shit!’
