Читать книгу Crackpot - Philip Loraine - Страница 9

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!’ he said; then turned and saw his ex-wife. Further words failed him.

Tamara was six years older than her divorced husband. Once a dancer (trained at what had then been the Kirov, she said), she now looked stringy, even anorexic, and her recently renovated red hair gave her pale skin a greenish tinge, in no way ameliorated by the burnt orange dress she had chosen to wear. Most of her clothes were cast-offs from the Knightsbridge boutique where she worked. Its accent was on the bizarre; it and Tamara suited each other perfectly.

Edvard couldn’t now remember why he’d married her. He had not at that time been quite as unbalanced as he’d become, but England and the English had depressed him beyond bearing, and he had presumably turned to this fellow-Russian in desperation. Eyeing the suitcase, he said, ‘No, Tamara, I don’t want you here.’

‘Oh darlink, you have other lady?’

No, he had not! Owing to the fact that Lisa MacDonnell, that contrary bitch, had locked herself into her studio with her chunks of marble—serve her bloody well right!—while Jacey was in London, sulking. He said, ‘I want to work.’

‘So work. Tamara will be a mouse.’

Edvard seemed not to have heard her; he had suddenly been seized by the unalterable conviction that Concertante 100 was no good, he’d gone over the top.

Tamara, eyeing his wild appearance, was thinking that divorce from this incipient lunatic had been the most sensible course she had ever taken. But she came of sensible peasant stock and knew that the way to a man, never mind his heart, was via his stomach. She said, ‘I will stay, I will make Borscht.’

‘Tamara, we got a divorce, remember? You didn’t want me, I didn’t want you. Please go away.’

After the recording session yesterday afternoon, he had gone to the Messaien concert at the Barbican. But he hadn’t been able to bear it because the master made his own work seem like mere sound and fury signifying nothing. He had left in misery during the interval, finding himself lost in the concrete hell of the Barbican complex. A kindly attendant, like something out of Kafka, had led him through the echoing labyrinth of this insane asylum before ejecting him into the wet and messy streets of the capital where he had walked like a lost soul.

‘Perhaps,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I will also make Koulibiaka.’

‘No point. They’re having one of their dinners tonight. I’m not going.’

‘Certainly you’ll go,’ cried Tamara, who had attended a previous dinner and found it enchanting. ‘You shall escort me, I shall wear my new green with sequins.’

Edvard had now remembered that he himself actually had an important reason for wishing to attend; so he smiled and said, ‘And I will wear my scarlet shirt, we’ll be sensational.’

In her stable-yard studio, Vicky Lind finished the ‘December’ hares and signed the watercolour with her well-known signature. Then she went to the window overlooking the yard and stood there staring out towards the stall where the mare awaited her foal. The vet emerged from it with Oliver Langdale; the vet got into his car and drove away; Oliver returned to the manor. For some reason she was unable to analyse or rationalize, Vicky Lind had become … ‘involved’, there was no other word for it, in the whole business of this pending birth. Why? She’d seen all kinds of animals born, she’d even given birth herself. Technically there was no mystery; but if she closed her eyes she instantly saw the mare’s large lustrous eyes, could almost feel the trembling which racked her every now and again. So few things ever affected her personally that she was almost afraid of the degree to which she was … very well, obsessed by the small (vast) everyday act of nature which was proceeding ineluctably over there at the corner of the yard. It seemed to have some meaning for her which she was unable to understand.

Presently she became aware of the postman’s van parked near the manor; turned and went to collect her mail, she was expecting a contract.

Laurence Otterey had heard the clack of his letter-box but couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed in order to claim a few bills, and so lay there staring at the Kilner jar in which Mrs Merritt had transported her soup. He had made up his mind to abandon the damned novel, in fact to burn it so that there was no going back short of writing those 180 pages all over again, a penance he had no intention of undertaking.

He turned his face into the pillow and lay there inert, as if his block, the whole ton of it, had squashed him to death.

Down at The Lodge, Edvard Kusnik rewound the tape of Concertante 100 and then stood watching it wipe itself clean forever. Was it the trash he now imagined it to be, or was it perhaps the best thing he’d ever done? If the latter, others, not he, were responsible for its destruction: all those anti-Semitic apes who inhabited the rest of Crestcote. Yes, and that went for Lisa MacDonnell too; if she hadn’t preferred her chunks of marble to his own beautiful, warm, virile body all this self-doubt might have been avoided; there was nothing like a little active sex for bolstering artistic confidence. By the time the silly cow came to her senses it would be too late. In fact, he thought grimly, watching the slowly revolving tape, it was already much, much too late.

Sarah Langdale was very fond of her resident sculptress, preferring her to any other member of the community; it was an affection which Lisa MacDonnell returned. They now leaned side by side against Lisa’s marble, watching through the door of the coach-house/studio the interesting antics of Madame Vicky Lind who had cornered Sarah’s husband on the far side of the yard, waving a sheet of paper under his nose and at the same time haranguing him energetically. Oliver Langdale was looking irritated and apprehensive; both were red in the face.

‘What,’ inquired Sarah, ‘do you imagine it’s all about?’

‘Oh, this,’ replied Lisa without hesitation, ‘bet you anything you like. I know she got one.’ Sarah took the photocopied anonymous note, liberally marked with rings from the bottom of Lisa’s coffee-mug, and stared at it. I saw you in London last night. Wickedness! More later.

‘But … Lisa, what does it mean?’

‘Nothing, I’d say, except that there’s a nutter around.’ She had turned to the marble and was feeling it with practised fingertips.

The Lord of the Manor, followed by an expostulating Vicky Lind, was now advancing on them. He was saying, ‘You mustn’t let it upset you, for God’s sake, it’s obviously some kind of practical joke.’

‘Even the crowd you’ve got here,’ snapped Vicky, ‘would hardly call that a joke.’

Still examining the marble for possible flaws, Lisa said, ‘Anyway, I’d have thought we’re all far too self-centred to even think of playing jokes on each other.’

‘You don’t suppose,’ asked Sarah, aghast, ‘that everybody’s been sent one?’

Oliver was avoiding his wife’s eyes, for the simple reason that he had found a copy of this very communication among the correspondence awaiting his return, and he was only just containing the guilty conscience and panic it had aroused in him. As Sarah, Mrs Merritt and young Kevin suspected, he had no more been in Ireland buying a horse than in India buying an elephant; he had been shacked up in Brown’s Hotel with his latest lady-love who happened to be the wife of an exceedingly rich and influential neighbour. A dreadful suspicion crossed his mind that this appalling Lind woman was using the letter to blackmail him: he said, ‘Were you in London last night?’

‘No. I was here, and lots of people saw me.’

Panic was making Oliver feel weak in the back of his legs. Somebody was blackmailing him all right. Think of the scandal if his exceedingly rich and influential neighbour found out—if the media found out, for God’s sake—perhaps most appalling of all (but noticeably the last to enter his mind) if Sarah found out! Forcing himself to think coherently, he was almost sure that his wife never bothered with any envelope which wasn’t addressed to her personally, picking these out and leaving all the rest, including the junk mail, to him. Or had she on this occasion noticed the unaddressed envelope and been curious? He glanced at her pretty, comfortable face and thought not; if she’d read the anonymous note she’d have said so, instantly, that was the kind of person she was. Well, wasn’t she? And besides, he had examined the envelope carefully for signs of it having been steamed open. There were none.

Very well, so Sarah didn’t know about it but somebody did, and that somebody could cause the most disastrous havoc. For God’s sake, who could it be and how could he be silenced?

Sarah was now coping efficiently with Mrs Lind’s bad temper. ‘I think Oliver’s right, it’s got to be someone’s idea of a joke—in very bad taste. Lisa, don’t you agree?’

Lisa shrugged, turning from her examination of the marble. ‘Could be. Your British sense of humour has always defeated me.’

‘All I hope,’ said Madame Lind, ‘is that you get to the bottom of it damn quick.’ Her attitude was beginning to rile Sarah, who replied more sharply, ‘And how would you go about that?’

‘Ask your inmates,’ suggested Vicky, as to an idiot.

Oliver might betray his wife at the drop of a hat, but he wasn’t going to have this tedious, and really rather common, little woman being rude to her; also he didn’t awfully like the word ‘inmates’. ‘What good would that do? Whoever it is would obviously lie.’

Vicky snorted. ‘It’s a very unpleasant situation. I’ve always felt protected here, that was the major … lure in your prospectus.’

At this, Sarah’s irritation came to the boil: ‘There were no “lures” in our prospectus, and we’ve never promised any kind of protection. Crestcote’s part of the world, and the world’s a pretty lousy place these days. If you don’t like it here you’re free to go—we’d waive the month’s notice.’

Lisa thought this was a damn good answer, but Madame Lind, no fool, sidestepped it neatly: ‘If you ask me, it’s a matter for the police—there’s a sex-maniac around.’ Like many women with little interest in sex, she was adept at seeing satyrs behind every bush. She turned on Lisa: ‘You don’t seem very interested, I must say.’

‘Frankly I don’t give a damn, I’ve more important things to worry about.’

‘Well, don’t blame me if the whole thing blows up in your face. People who ignore obvious warnings get what’s coming to them. And this—’ waving the photo-copy—‘is typical of a deranged male mind.’

Oliver had a nasty feeling that there was nothing deranged about it; in fact, he was now quite sure that all these other notes had been sent as a blind, concealing the truth: that he himself was the real target. Meanwhile his wife, ashamed of her moment’s anger, took Vicky’s arm and said, ‘We’ll bring it up at dinner tonight—it’ll be fun. You are coming?’

‘I intended to, but now …’

‘You must. And I bet it will all have explained itself away long before then.’

The anonymous note was showing no sign of doing any such thing. On the contrary, it was causing reverberations all over Crestcote that afternoon.

Johnny Ash and Rosamund faced each other in anger, both balanced on precarious pyramids of love and distrust. ‘Now,’ he was saying, ‘she admits she didn’t get home until two a.m.! So this bloody thing could apply to you. What were you doing all that time?

‘Minding,’ replied Rosamund, flushed, ‘my own bleeding business. What were you doing?’

‘I told you, boozing in Bristol.’

‘And that’s a lie. I didn’t drink a thing all night—if you’d been boozing I’d have smelt you a mile off.’

He was completely taken aback and showed it. ‘Come on,’ continued Rosamund, ‘what were you doing?’

She expected him to veer away from the question, and that’s exactly what he did, holding out the piece of paper. ‘It says “in London”. You were in London, I was in Bristol. Who saw you doing what?’

She had to swing away from him to control her temper; if it broke loose now she knew exactly what it would make her say: ‘For Christ’s sake, Johnny, let’s cut the crap. I know you go up to London at least twice a month without telling me. Why won’t you tell me? Why don’t we let the skeleton out of the cupboard?’ Something like that—and thank God she didn’t say it: perhaps because she was more scared than angry: scared that someone had unearthed his secret which clearly seemed to him so dangerous, and was about to use it in order to hurt him. She had no doubt at all that the sheet of anonymous garbage referred to him.

Gazing at her rigid back, Johnny Ash was visited for the first time by an awful suspicion that she knew; perhaps she’d known for years, ever since they first met.

When she turned back she was so stricken by his lost expression that the last trace of anger disappeared in a flash, replaced by love and pity. She said, ‘I’ll tell you what I did, I went and saw Mad Hattie, we had a few joints together. If anyone saw us they’d hardly think it very wicked, would they?’

She saw relief creep over his face and could have wept for the mistrust which, however much they loved one another, lay between them. He frowned, gazing at the photocopy: ‘So what’s it all about?’

She didn’t answer for fear of saying, ‘Oh Johnny, you know damn well.’ But then again, the note might have nothing at all to do with him. She seized on the nearest, most comforting possibility: ‘Some of them are jealous of us, you must know that. I mean … loving each other the way we do, and … you being so successful.’

He jumped at it. ‘Trying to come between us.’

‘And succeeding by the look of it!’

He gave a small gasp, dropped the troublesome message on to the kitchen table and put his arms around her. ‘Take more than crap like that to come between us.’

‘I didn’t tell you what I’d been doing because I knew you’d worry. I’m not … slipping back into the old bad habits.’

He looked deeply into her lovely eyes and saw only honesty there. If only, if only he could be as honest himself. He said, ‘I know you’re not. How was Mad Hattie?’

‘Same as ever. Sent you her love.’ She knew that he was about to kiss her and that the moment, like so many others, would end in love-making. But, like most women, she was a realist; she knew that a moment must come when there wouldn’t be that easy escape. Her mother was fond of saying, ‘Never forget—truth will out.’ Rosamund, responding to his kiss, believed it.

At The Lodge, Tamara Kusnik was in the garden picking a large bunch of slightly frost-nipped chrysanthemums from the bedraggled border. Returning to the cottage, she posed in the doorway as if for a curtain-call, but then noticed that her ex-husband was holding in one hand a glass of vodka and in the other a sheet of paper. He was looking disconcerted.