Читать книгу The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018 - Elizabeth Day, Elizabeth Day - Страница 8

Tipworth Police Station, 2.40 p.m.

I REACH ACROSS THE TABLE FOR MY COOLING TEA. My throat is dry from all the talking. My eyes, too, feel scratchy. I wonder if I could ask for some Optrex drops but one look at Grey Suit’s downturned mouth suggests the request wouldn’t be met in a generous spirit.

He still hasn’t spoken. While Beige Hair has been looking at me in a frank, friendly fashion and interjecting with the odd murmur as I recount the evening’s events, Grey Suit has been sitting impassively in his chair, arms folded across his stomach. No paunch. A hint of hard muscle beneath the gentle stretching of the shirt buttons.

I’m guessing you have to keep fit if you’re in the police. There are probably regular tests where they have to run measured distances as a beeper goes off at shorter and shorter intervals. I can imagine Grey Suit in shorts and a loose T-shirt, perhaps bearing the faded crest of an American university he never attended, sprinting with all his might, his face as void of thought as it is now.

I knew people like him at school: boys who excelled at physicality and who never needed to try with anything else. Big, slab-faced boys with no personalities and an understanding of the world wholly predicated on who would win in any given contest. The kind of boy who would always initiate an arm wrestle in a pub. They were popular, these boys. I wonder if it’s because we all have an innate need to be protected. So we seek out the bigger, brawnier specimens and we want to be around them because they will shield us one day when we most need shielding. They will man the lifeboats when we hit the iceberg. And for this, we are willing to overlook their complete lack of conversational guile or intellect.

‘So,’ Beige Hair is saying, ‘you weren’t staying at the big house. At Tipworth Priory, I mean?’

I can’t work out whether this is a tactic or whether she really hasn’t been paying attention.

‘No. As I think I already said.’

Beige Hair nods. ‘Of course you did, Martin. Of course you did.’

Grey Suit shifts in his chair.

‘That didn’t bother you, then?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘Not staying at the Priory? With Ben and Serena?’

‘Not at all.’

In my account of the build-up to the party, I omitted a few of the more trivial details. There was simply no need for the police to know Lucy had been offended. Beige Hair keeps looking at me.

‘They had lots of family members staying,’ I say to fill the silence. ‘It was just a logistics thing.’

‘Right.’

I exhale more loudly than I intended, not realising I’ve been holding my breath. It’s ridiculous, really, how nervous they make you feel. Even when you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s like those customs officials at American airports, scowling and rude and suspicious of anything you say.

Beige Hair is looking at me expectantly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t quite catch that?’

‘Well, Martin, I was only saying that they seem to have a lot of bedrooms at the Priory. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to find space, would it? And you’re such close friends, it just seems odd …’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ben and Serena. Besides, there were security issues.’

‘Of course. The VIP.’

‘Exactly.’

I glance upwards to the ceiling, hoping to find something of interest there. In one corner, there is a hairline crack. A childhood memory comes to me unbidden: my mother washing my hair in the bath as I, hating every second, fixed my gaze on a crack in the yellowing ceiling, willing it to be over.

‘Are you all right?’ asks Beige Hair.

‘Perfectly.’

‘You look a bit upset.’

‘Not at all,’ I repeat. ‘Just wondering how much longer this will take.’

She turns one sheet of paper over, shifting it to the other side of her folder and revealing another page of foolscap beneath, covered with scrawled black handwriting.

‘So you and your wife arrived at the party before the other guests to have a drink with Ben and Serena,’ she recaps. ‘Did you think Mr Fitzmaurice was acting normally?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, did anything strike you as out of character?’

I shrug.

‘Anything on his mind, perhaps?’

‘It was three weeks ago. I don’t understand why you’re raking it all up now …’

‘You must know it takes time to gather together the relevant facts,’ she says. ‘As a journalist, I mean.’

I don’t say anything.

She tries a different tack.

‘How did Lucy think Mr Fitzmaurice seemed?’

‘You’d have to ask her.’

‘Oh, she’s been very helpful with our enquiries,’ Beige Hair says. ‘But I wondered what you thought, Martin.’

She waits.

‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’d like me to think was on his mind and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or not?’

For the first time, her expression hardens.

‘We don’t have time for guessing games, Mr Gilmour. In case it had escaped your notice, we’ve got a person lying in a critical condition in hospital.’

Mr Gilmour, now. No longer Martin. She stops. A note of irascibility is creeping into her tone and I can see her struggle internally to keep it in check.

‘We just want to establish the facts,’ she says, more gently. ‘So that we can work out exactly what happened and then we can all go home.’ She smiles. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’

Grey Suit sniffs his assent, but otherwise stays immobile.

I place the tea back on the table. They have given it to me without a spoon or a stirrer and the sugar has sunk to the bottom like sediment.

‘I thought he seemed entirely himself,’ I say.

Obviously, I am lying.

2 May

Kitchen, Tipworth Priory, 7.30 p.m.

WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING as we walked back through to the kitchen. Our champagne flutes were empty. There was a distance between us, solid as concrete. I regretted my comment about not staying over. Stupid of me to say it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

‘So here, LS, we need your advice,’ Ben said, pointing towards a blank wall at the bottom of a narrow staircase in the back of the house. It must have once been used by servants, I thought, staring at the stripped wooden steps. Although did monks have servants? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem a particularly monkish thing to have.

‘Oh. How so?’

‘We want a big piece of art. To lift it a bit, y’know.’

A few years ago, Ben started saying y’know, eliding the two words to form a seamless whole. It was around the time certain politicians started eschewing the glottal stop in order to demonstrate their man-of-the-people credentials. I suppose it was intended to denote a certain informality, a lightness of touch, a sense that, in spite of Ben’s enormous pile of inherited wealth and his aggressively successful hedge fund, he was in truth just an easy-going guy. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could kick a ball around with. Someone of whom one could say, ‘Oh Ben, he’s great. One of us. No airs and graces.’

This reputation was important to Ben. At school, it came to him naturally. Later in life, it was one he cultivated, and I found it less convincing. As a teenager, he had been touchingly sincere. These days, he saw sincerity as a valuable asset and it wasn’t quite the same thing. Admittedly, people who didn’t know him as well as I did gobbled it up. Ben acquired friends with ease. He had never liked being alone. And now, in this vast house, surrounded by sound engineers and gardeners and waiting staff, anticipating the arrival of some three hundred and fifty guests to celebrate his fortieth birthday, he should have been in his element.

‘What kind of thing were you thinking?’ I asked, knowing Ben wouldn’t have a clue.

‘Oh, fuck knows. Something … modern. And big.’ He laughed, rubbing his nose. ‘What’s the name of that guy Serena likes so much? The guy who does the graffiti?’

So fucking predictable.

‘Banksy.’

‘Yeah. Him.’

‘Mmm. Possibly a bit passé now.’

‘Ha! I knew you’d know.’

‘I’ll have a think,’ I said, knowing that I would do no such thing. It was clear no one would ever see this part of the house. Serena wouldn’t dream of asking for my advice anywhere that actually counted.

‘Thanks, mate.’ He squeezed my arm. ‘Let’s get back to the girls.’

Always ‘girls’, never ‘women’. It drove Lucy mad.

In the kitchen, Serena and my wife were perched awkwardly on high stools on opposite sides of a free-standing unit. The unit’s surface appeared to be constructed out of four-inch-thick white marble but as I approached, I realised it was a sort of galvanised rubber. When I touched it, it had a texture like a fireman’s hose. A lemon squeezer constructed out of chrome and resembling a rocket launcher stood ostentatiously in the centre.

‘… nightmare, you can’t imagine,’ Serena was saying. She raised her head at the sound of our footsteps, giving a short smile that quickly dissolved.

‘What are you two gossiping about?’ Ben bent and started rubbing Serena’s shoulders. She made a show of stretching her neck, moving her head from side to side.

‘I’m soooo knotted up,’ she said.

‘I know, sweetie. You’ve been working too hard.’

‘Has there been a lot to do?’ Lucy asked. I caught her eye. We shared a flash of amusement. Neither of us can take Serena seriously when she talks about being busy.

‘Don’t get me started,’ she replied. ‘You just cannot rely on people doing what they’re meant to do. And then there’s all the added security we’ve had to—’ She broke off. A warning look from Ben.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s only … well, we weren’t really meant to say anything …’

‘No, darling. We were sworn to secrecy.’

‘Oh come on, babe, it’s only Martin and Lucy.’

I noted the ‘only’.

‘What security?’ Lucy asked.

‘There’s a notion,’ Ben started, ‘but I can’t stress enough, it really is only a notion, that we might be expecting a very important guest.’

He paused, full of self-importance. I refused to encourage him and turned to look out of the window at the kitchen garden, filled with terracotta pots of herbs and flowering jasmine.

‘The Prime Minister,’ Serena squealed, unable to contain herself.

‘Darling.’ His hand came to a stop on her shoulder, the fingers pressing down next to her collarbone so that the crescent moons of his nails turned white. ‘We don’t know whether—’

‘No, no, I know. But he said he’d make every effort.’

‘Wow,’ Lucy said, with no enthusiasm.

‘She didn’t vote for him,’ I explained.

‘Did you?’ Ben asked me. ‘Or are you still pretending to be left-wing?’

‘I’d say that was none of your business, Ben,’ Lucy said, sharply.

He laughed.

‘Sorry, Luce, sorry. You’re right. No more political talk.’

The Prime Minister was an old family friend of Ben’s. His name was Edward but as soon as he’d been elected leader, he had started asking everyone to call him Ed in the vain hope that everyone would forget about his Etonian background. His and Ben’s mothers had known each other way back when. I had met him twice at Ben’s dinner parties, long before he became smooth and polished and airbrushed, one of those public men incapable of shaking a hand without clasping it. I didn’t have much time for him, truth be told. But Serena had always been pathetically impressed. She enjoyed proximity to power. I sipped my champagne. ‘It’ll be nice to see Ed again.’

‘Oh, have you met him?’

‘Yes, several times. At yours. For dinner.’

He nodded vaguely.

‘Of course, of course. I’d forgotten.’ Ben poured us all another glass of Veuve. ‘A lot’s changed since then.’

There seemed to be nothing to say in response. I took the stool next to Lucy, resting the soles of my shoes on a ledge that was too close to the seat to be comfortable. Ben stayed standing.

‘Yes, there’ll be plenty of people you know. Mark, Bufty, Fliss, obviously; Arpad and Seb. Oh, and you remember Andrew Jarvis, don’t you, LS?’

I stiffen.

‘From school. And Cambridge.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feigning nonchalance. ‘Jarvis.’ His name redolent of a smirk of thick muscle beneath a tightly buttoned school shirt. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘He’s an MP now. One of Ed’s lot. Junior energy minister. He and his wife have just bought a place down the road.’

‘He found someone willing to marry him, did he? Wonders will never cease.’

‘Oh come on, he wasn’t that bad.’

‘His wife’s a sweetie,’ Serena added.

‘She is,’ Ben agreed. ‘She really is.’

I let it go. Ben has a bottomless capacity to reinvent the past. I think it’s a calculated tactic. He rewrites a narrative to suit his needs at any given time and he’s so casual about it, no one seems to care. It’s an admirable skill, really, when one thinks about it.

Ben raised his glass.

‘To us,’ he said, one hand still resting on his wife’s neck.

‘To our dear friends,’ I added. ‘Ben and Serena.’

Ben, more at ease now in a familiar pose of bonhomie, gave an expansive grin. His top three shirt buttons were undone, revealing a sprouting of dark hairs. He was tanned. He was always tanned from a recent holiday or golf game or simple genetic good fortune. He smelled of oak and leather – the same aftershave he’d been wearing for years, ever since his father gave him a bottle when he turned sixteen. He was handsome in an unexpected way. His mouth was perhaps too large, a little loose around the lips. His nose was arguably a bit flat. There were wrinkles across his brow. But when you put it all together, it worked. There was a ruggedness to his looks, a worn-in quality that suited the encroaching years. I had to admit: I’d never seen him look so good.

‘Yes,’ Serena said. ‘Friends.’

Lucy tipped the glass back to a forty-five-degree angle and sank most of the champagne in one gulp. I laid my hand on hers. Her skin felt hot. She placed the flute back on the counter, fingers shaking.

There was a noisy clatter from the far end of the room and then the sound of childish squawking.

‘Mama!’

A small, rotund shape bowled across the floor and launched himself at Serena’s legs. This was Hector who, at three years old, was the most obstreperous of the Fitzmaurice children.

‘My love,’ Serena cooed. She bent to pick him up, straining the sinews of her yoga-toned arms as she did so. Hector was a barrel-shaped child with a square head and un-charming features. His brow loomed over the sockets of his eyes, giving him the appearance of an elderly ape.

‘Hello, Hector,’ I said.

This unprepossessing lump was, I’m sad to say, my godson. To be frank, I was offended they had waited till their third progeny to ask and I’ve never wholly got over the slight. I am, however, punctilious in the observation of all my duties. He got an engraved silver tankard for his christening and has had a bottle of fine wine put aside for him every year since then at Berry Bros. Heaven knows what he will ever do to deserve it. He has none of Cosima’s grace or Cressida’s impishness. (The youngest, Bear, is still at the baby stage, so it’s hard to tell how he’ll turn out.)

‘Gah,’ the child responded.

Tucked cosily on his mother’s lap, he looked glumly out at the rest of us, clearly wishing us all to be gone. He started pawing at Serena’s blouse.

‘Mee-ma,’ he said. ‘Mee-ma, mee-ma.’ His voice rose to an un-ignorable pitch.

‘No, darling, not now. Mee-ma for later.’

She removed his chunky, dimpled hand from her breasts. Serena believes in attachment parenting. She breastfed Cosima until she was four and had a full set of teeth.

‘Could I have a top-up, Ben?’ Lucy was reaching out with her empty glass.

‘Sorry, darling. Should have noticed.’

He poured the champagne too quickly so that it bubbled up, almost to the rim, and he had to wait for the foam to slide back down. When her glass was full, Lucy took it and swallowed almost half of it in one go. I had noticed her drinking more over preceding months and I didn’t want her to be drunk tonight. It would be embarrassing and, apart from anything else, I needed an ally.

I cocked my head towards hers.

‘Don’t you think—’

‘No, Martin. No I don’t,’ she said, too loudly. Hector, startled by the sound of her voice, started crying.

‘Oh baby, oh no, oh baby, don’t cry,’ Serena cooed. She stroked his hair with her hand. ‘They didn’t mean to shout, did they? No they didn’t.’

Lucy glared at me. Then she leaned over and tapped the child’s podgy leg with one hand.

‘Hey, Hector.’ Tap tap tap. ‘Hey, hey. I’m sorry. Don’t be a baby.’ Tap tap tap. ‘You’re a big boy now, aren’t you? No need to cry.’ Tap tap tap.

When Lucy removed her hand, I could see a red mark on his thigh.

Serena turned her back to us, shielding Hector from our sight.

‘Shall I take him?’ Ben offered.

Serena stood without answering and walked out of the room with the screaming Hector. The sound of her rubber-soled espadrilles on the tiled floor as she left seemed designed to express her unvoiced fury.

Ben exhaled. He shrugged apologetically.

‘Don’t worry about it, Luce.’

‘I wasn’t,’ she said.

Ben laughed. ‘Good. That’s OK then.’

He walked to the fridge, which loomed in one corner of the kitchen, emitting a low-frequency hum.

‘Snacks,’ he announced to no one in particular, sliding out a platter covered in cling film and bringing it over to the table. He took the film off with a flourish. There was a selection of soggy-looking salmon blinis, a few slices of hard cheese that looked like Manchego and some mini-sandwiches cut into triangles. A smear of brown in the centre suggested leftover chutney that someone else had already eaten. Leftovers, I thought. So that’s all we’re worth.

‘You guys want some water?’

I reached for a blini. ‘Yes, please.’

He came back with a bottle in a familiar shade of light blue. I immediately recognised the label: the cursive green writing, the line drawing of those hills I used to see every day when I walked to lessons. It was Burtonbury mineral water, said to be the finest in Britain and drunk by no lesser person than the Queen.

Ben twisted the cap, releasing a fizzing jet of air. As he poured, the splash of liquid against glass cracked the ice cubes.

Martin

Burtonbury, 1989

BURTONBURY WAS SITUATED ON THE OUTSKIRTS of a picturesque Midlands town which had flourished in the late Victorian era thanks to an abundance of natural spring water. The school building had once been a hotel for gentlemen afflicted with rattling coughs or dyspeptic stomachs, and pale-faced women in black lace suffering from attacks of the vapours who travelled up from London with their valises and their maids in order to ‘take the cure’. It was the most fashionable place to be seen: the rehab centre of its day, where faded personalities would disappear for weeks on end in order to drink from the wells and soak in tepid baths with hot flannel compresses strapped to their fevered brows.

For a time, a handsome young doctor from Adelboden in Switzerland – called, rather wonderfully, Dr Schnitzel – took up residence as the medical director. When I arrived, there was a sepia photograph of him still hanging in the school’s entrance hall: a bearded man with curlicues of hair framing each ear, his eyes hooded, like a lugubrious Russian novelist.

But the water cure, just like the cabbage soup diet, was a transient fad and, after a while, Dr Schnitzel returned to Adelboden, the custom dried up and the red-brick, high Gothic Empire Hotel fell into a state of disrepair. It was requisitioned during the two world wars. In the 1950s, it was bought up by a couple from Birmingham who made it into a care home for the elderly, ripping out all the marble-floored bathrooms and hand-painted cornices and replacing the luscious carpets with a thin, hard-wearing material in institutional green.

It became Burtonbury in 1960, a boys’ boarding school designed initially to cater for the children of diplomats posted abroad. Through the years, it cultivated a reputation for middle-ranking academic rigour and some modest sporting success. It was a decent school, but it didn’t belong to the higher echelons of private education. It tried very hard to be Eton or Harrow and yet, like a newly minted millionaire who buys a bright blue Rolls-Royce without realising it should have been a petrol-black Bentley, it never quite outgrew its arriviste status. Burtonbury always languished just outside the top twenty in the annual league tables. The Tatler