Indictment for Murder Page 7

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

  As they strolled off, she said, ‘You look very smart in your tails. And I love your buttonhole.’

  ‘We only wear buttonholes today,’ Jonathan replied.

  ‘David wears them all the time,’ said Rory.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because he’s President of Pop.’

  ‘What’s Pop?’ Nicola asked. ‘On the drive down your father kept talking about Pop. He seemed to think David Trelawney was a great swell.’

  ‘He is,’ Jonathan replied. ‘Pop is what the Eton Society is called. They run the school.’

  ‘A bunch of self-elected snobs,’ added Rory.

  Nicola laughed. ‘Then why aren’t you both in Pop?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re not grand enough,’ Jonathan said. ‘And David’s captain of the Eleven. He’s playing now, back there.’

  ‘Cricket’s boring,’ Nicola said.

  When they came back to the cars Beau was half-asleep. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he said.

  ‘Showing Nicola around,’ Jonathan replied.

  The Trelawneys had vanished – to find David, Julia said, as she gave them their picnic. David had not appeared until after the match was over, when they went to the Boat Club at Maidenhead to dine before the Procession of Boats and the fireworks. Before dinner they sat on the lawn by the river. David, prompted by Beau, was describing the match, especially his part in it. Nicola got up and wandered into the club-house. After a few minutes Jonathan followed her. She was standing in the dining-room, looking at the old, sepia-coloured photographs on the walls of groups of young men, all with long, curly moustaches, wearing blazers and little striped caps or pill-box hats.

  ‘He’ll look like that one day,’ she said.

  ‘Who will?’ he asked.

  ‘Your friend,’ she said.

  At dinner, Beau placed David next to Nicola, but she never spoke nor looked at him.

  A month later it was Lord’s and Nicola was there again, wearing a small straw hat balanced on top of her dark curls. Jonathan overheard her grandmother talking to Julia.

  ‘She won’t be coming out for two more years, and later in the summer she’s going to the States to visit that wretched father of hers. Why, I don’t know. He’s usually too drunk to recognise her.’

  ‘Does she have to?’

  ‘Her uncle, the good brother, likes her to come. He says she is, after all, the daughter of an American. When her mother was alive she’d never let Nicola go, but I thought she ought to see something of her American cousins. In September she goes to Paris for three years, to be finished.’

  David covered himself in glory at Lord’s, as he always did. He made a hundred before lunch. Both Beau and Richard Trelawney had been full of it.

  ‘Hardly ever been done before, you know,’ Beau had told everyone. ‘That boy’ll play for England one day.’

  During the tea interval, after they had joined the promenade in front of the pavilion and were back at the coach the Playfairs were sharing with the Trelawneys, Nicola had whispered to Jonathan, ‘Why does your father go on about David Trelawney. He’s not his son.’

  Jonathan had not said that Beau wished he had a son who made a hundred at Lord’s and was President of Pop. All he said was, ‘Our families are great friends. His father was with mine in the war.’

  Rory joined them in the evening at a musical at the Adelphi. Beau nearly ruined the evening by complaining that the leading man had been at Cambridge in 1914 and the star of the Footlights, but had never gone to the war like everyone else. ‘He said he’d varicose veins, but he spent four years prancing about the stage in the West End,’ Beau grumbled. ‘If I’d known that damn fellow was in the show, I’d never have come.’

  It was Annette who calmed him down. Afterwards they went to supper at Nicola’s grandmother’s house in Kensington. Beau again made David sit next to Nicola, but Julia had pushed Jonathan forward to sit on Nicola’s other side. At the end of the meal Beau stood up and tapped on his wine glass with his fork.

  ‘I want to propose a toast,’ he said, ‘a toast to the hero of the hour. Not many fellows ever make a hundred at Lord’s before lunch, and one day that fellow will be playing for England. And we’ll all be proud to know him. So here’s to David.’

  He raised his glass, but before anyone could raise theirs there came another ring on a glass. It was Nicola. ‘Not many fellows win scholarships to Magdalene,’ she piped up. ‘So here’s to Jonathan.’

  There was a momentary silence. Julia smiled across the table at her, and then at Jonathan, who could feel himself blushing. Then Nicola’s grandmother broke the silence. ‘Quite right. Here’s to both of them. Here’s to David and Jonathan.’ And they all joined in.

  Later, in the drawing-room Beau called out, ‘Come on, Rory. Let’s have one of your Irish songs – “Flanagan’s Flying Machine” or “Slattery’s Light Dragoons”. One of those.’

  ‘Not tonight, sir,’ Rory replied. He went to the piano and began to play Cole Porter tunes from The Gay Divorcée. Beau and Annette leaned over him and began to croon ‘Night and Day.’

  Julia and Nicola’s grandmother were together on the sofa; Richard Trelawney on a chair a little apart from them, his eyes closed. Jonathan followed Nicola over to the french windows open to the garden. ‘When are you going to America?’ he asked.

  ‘Next week. Then to Paris.’

  ‘Can I write to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course you can.’

  He had written every month, and she had replied once or twice. He still had those letters. In one she’d written from Newport, where she’d gone to stay with a friend.

  It’s very grand. At dinner parties there’s a footman behind every chair, and we play tennis at the beach club while a 20-piece orchestra plays dance tunes on the lawn under the trees. Rory would love that. But there’s too much seaweed on the shore-line and it gets in my toes and I hate it. Daddy’s very ill.

  When she was in Paris, and he at Cambridge, he still wrote, but she did not reply. He did not see her again until two years later.

  She was ‘coming out’ that summer Season of 1939 and Jonathan was asked by her grandmother to escort her to a pre-Season dance. When he saw her he hardly recognised her – hair long and curled at the back; lips and fingernails scarlet.

  For him the evening had not been a success. Too many young men had swarmed around her, queueing to get her to write their names in her dance programme. What another world those dance programmes conjured up, Jonathan thought as he lay in his bed in the cold bedroom at Pembroke House. Little white booklets engraved in silver, the dances numbered, with a blank space for the names of the partners to be written with a small pencil attached on a ribbon. It was the supper dance that mattered most, because that was the dance immediately before supper and that meant longer together. He should have had the supper dance with her, but by the time he asked another name was in her programme. But in the taxi on the way home he asked her to come to Cambridge in the first week of June, to a May Week ball. She said she might.

  * * *

  He and Rory spent hours planning their May Week party. During the day, the river; in the evening, the Footlights revue and the May Week ball in the marquees spread over the garden beneath the floodlit sixteenth-century towers; at dawn, breakfast at Grantchester.

  ‘After that,’ Rory said, ‘it’s each man – and girl – for themselves. So make sure you book the girls separate rooms at the hotel.’

  What was the name of the girl Rory had brought? Jonathan lay trying to remember, glad not to sleep lest his nightmare returned. He could picture her well enough – she had been short, with long, blonde hair and blue, china-doll eyes. But her name had gone. She was training to be an actress at the Webber Douglas School of Acting, though no one later had ever seen her on the stage. If she was still alive, Jonathan thought, she’d be an old lady now, and fat, because she’d been plump even then. He had seen her only once after Cambridge,
fifteen months later, in October 1940, when the blitz on London had begun. She was at a crowded bar in a night-club with a naval officer, but by the time he’d crossed the room to her they had gone, and he’d never seen her again. By then she had long ceased to be Rory’s girl. He’d had a string of girlfriends after her. One early in 1940 when both he and Jonathan had just been commissioned and were wearing the single star of a second-lieutenant, was a busty sergeant-major who was in charge of the uniformed ATS girls serving the officers’ mess at the depot. An officer was not meant to have an affair with one of them, but Rory didn’t care. He made her come to London and squeeze into some of the clothes his sister had left in her flat in Richmond and he took her away for weekends. When, eventually, he, and Jonathan, had been posted away, Rory said she’d wept. ‘But she’s a good sport,’ he had said. ‘She won’t peach.’ And she never had.

  The blonde Rory had brought to Cambridge had been the same type, jolly, and rather plump, the kind Rory liked. What had she been called? Eve? Eleanor? Try as he might, Jonathan could not now remember.

  He did remember how he had told himself it was bound to rain when Nicola came, but it had turned out a perfect June day. Was that summer of 1939 really so full of cloudless days and moonlit nights as he now remembered? For that was how he thought of his last summer of peace, just as Beau had of his last summer in 1914, golden days and velvet nights until, before the leaves had begun to turn, each had become a soldier. Rory had collected his girl off the London train and brought her to the boat-house. Nicola had come up earlier and had helped Jonathan prepare the picnic in his rooms in college. When they were cutting the sandwiches, she asked, ‘Who’s in our party?’

  ‘Only you and me, and Rory and his girl. No-one else.’

  In the punt on the river, he had taken the pole. Both girls – Nicola dark, the other blonde – lay on the cushions facing him, trailing their hands in the water. Rory lounged opposite them, his back to Jonathan. Nicola was in white, holding a large hat with a ribbon in her lap. Jonathan had to be careful to avoid water from the pole dripping on to the girls as he raised it before slipping it back into the river, leaning on it, pushing the punt slowly upstream. For this whole day and evening, he had thought, I have her to myself.

  They had moored under some trees, and eaten cold chicken and cucumber sandwiches and played a portable gramophone, while they drank what Rory called hock and seltzer – but was a cheap white wine from the college buttery mixed with soda water from a siphon. Rory had punted them back in the afternoon.

  More than sixty years later, lying in the darkness trying not to sleep, Jonathan could smell the mint and the sedge of the river, as he could the mown grass at that last Fourth of June. Mint and mown grass, and, at home, wallflowers. The scents of his youth.

  For the ball, Nicola had worn a long, dark green evening dress, the hem of which got very damp when they walked through the dew to breakfast at Grantchester. Rory’s girl wore black, which, she announced at dinner, set off her skin. Rory had agreed, patting her plump arm. At the Footlights revue, most of the music had been written by Rory, but Rory’s blonde complained that there weren’t any girls. There aren’t any at the university, Rory told her – at least, no pretty ones; those who were up were uglier than the men playing the girls’ parts. ‘That’s silly,’ Rory’s girl had said, and she was quite cross until he said that if she’d been up they would have made her the star. At the party backstage after the show she had flirted with the producer, a don, because he often produced plays in London and she thought he might get her a part. She didn’t know that flirting with him was a waste of time – he was interested only in the female impersonators. At the ball, it was after midnight when, unexpected and uninvited, David had appeared. Jonathan saw him first, standing by the dance floor, very tall and dark, in a bottle-green tail-coat with brass buttons, the dress-coat of a dining club. He saw them and began to thread his way through the tables. As he came he brushed back his dark hair from his forehead.

  ‘Here comes the bloody hero,’ said Rory. ‘He’s meant to be at Pembroke with the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs in the goal.’

  David pulled up a chair. ‘I’ve ditched my party,’ he said cheerfully. He dusted down the sides of his coat. ‘I had to climb over the wall to get in, so I’m a gate-crasher. What are you drinking? Champagne, good.’ And he poured himself a glass.

  ‘I thought you were with the rugger-buggers,’ Rory said. ‘What have you done with your girl?’

  ‘Last time I saw her she was heading for the shrubberies with Michael Harrington, so I did a bunk to join you. And here I am. I hope you’re pleased?’ He was looking at Nicola, smiling.

  ‘Only if you buy more wine,’ Rory said.

  ‘Of course,’ David replied. ‘Jonathan, be a good fellow and get hold of the waiter.’

  Rory stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking his girl’s arm. ‘Let’s dance.’ They disappeared on to the dance floor.

  ‘I haven’t seen you since the evening of the Lord’s match two years ago,’ David said to Nicola. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Abroad. I came back to London last Christmas.’

  ‘Jonathan told me you would be here. That’s why I came.’

  A waiter appeared. Jonathan said, ‘This gentleman’ – he indicated David – ‘wants to order.’ But David wasn’t listening. He was telling Nicola about the Trelawneys’ villa on the Riviera. ‘It’s near Antibes, overlooking the rocks and the sea, with a frangipani tree on the terrace. Have you ever seen a frangipani tree?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘And there’s bougainvillaea and hibiscus. It belongs to my mother.’

  ‘How is your father?’ Jonathan asked, the wine list in his hand.

  ‘Not well.’ David had not looked round. He was leaning towards Nicola. ‘I’m going there next week. You ought to come and stay.’

  ‘I’m going to the States, to see my cousins.’

  The waiter leaned over Jonathan and pointed to a wine on the list. When Jonathan turned to hand the card to David, he and Nicola were walking away. Jonathan ordered two more bottles and followed. He could see David’s tall figure steering her through the throng. When they danced, Nicola held herself very stiff and away from her partner. Back at their table the waiter gave Jonathan the bill for the champagne. Then Jonathan danced with Nicola; David with Rory’s girl. When David brought her back to the table she was puffing and laughing. Rory poured her more wine. ‘You’re meant to be with me,’ he said.

  At the gallop at the end, Rory manoeuvred the two girls next to each other so David was at the end of the line, his arm around Jonathan. When it was over David offered to drive them to Grantchester for breakfast. He had the family car, he said.

  ‘At last you’re making yourself useful,’ Rory had said. David held open the front passenger door for Nicola, but she got into the back with Rory and the other girl. So Jonathan sat beside David.

  At Grantchester the sun was already up. They ordered eggs-and-bacon and drank the last bottle of wine, which Rory had brought from the dance. Afterwards, with the dew heavy on the long grass, they strolled through the meadow to the river, the men in their tail-coats and white ties; the girls in their long dresses. As they walked Jonathan took Nicola’s arm and David, when he saw this, wandered back to the car and lit a cigarette. Standing by the river with his arm around Nicola, Jonathan had bent his face and she had looked up and he kissed her clumsily on the cheek. Then she turned her head away.

  Next day Nicola told Jonathan she’d been woken by the sound of the door opening. ‘Sorry. Wrong room,’ Rory had said, and disappeared.

  A month later, in July, Jonathan had again been asked, by her grandmother, to be Nicola’s partner. This was at the dinner party at the Savoy after Nicola’s presentation at an evening court at the Palace. As well as Beau and Julia, three others were in the party – a married couple, the young wife a cousin of Nicola’s, and an extra man for Nicola’s grandmother, a broad-shoulder
ed man with grizzled grey hair and very light grey eyes. Jonathan had then thought how old he was, but he could not have been more than fifty. A quarter of a century younger than I am now, Jonathan thought as he lay in bed remembering.

  Nicola had arrived at the Savoy in her white ball-gown, with a string of pearls around her neck. For the presentation she had worn a diamanté band around her forehead with three feathers, but she had taken them off and was carrying them. It was in the feathers that she had appeared to him in his dream.

  ‘How did it go?’ Beau asked.

  ‘Terrifying,’ she replied. ‘Especially the people gawking at us through the windows of the car while we waited in the queue in the Mall.’

  ‘Did they cheer when they saw you?’

  ‘No, one man shook his fist. But one or two blew kisses.’

  ‘Did you fall over when you curtseyed?’ Beau went on.

  ‘Certainly not. Grandmama had to go to the loo when we got inside the Palace, which was a bit of a bore because we nearly lost our place in the line. Then off we went, I behind grandmama, in procession. The poor king looked frightfully bored.’

  ‘I used to play tennis with him, at the old Melbury Club,’ Beau said. ‘He was quite good enough to get to Wimbledon, but when he did everyone rushed to the side court where he was playing to watch him. He got so nervous he couldn’t hit a ball. Then everyone said he’d only got to Wimbledon because he was the Duke of York.’ He stood up. ‘Come and dance,’ he said to Nicola. ‘My privilege to have the first dance with the evening’s princess.’

  Jonathan watched his father and Nicola dancing, as he had watched David and her a month before at the May Week ball. But now, as she danced, Nicola was relaxed, laughing. Beau could always make any woman laugh. But I couldn’t, Jonathan thought.

  A week later Nicola had left on the Queen Mary from Southampton for the States and her grandmother asked Jonathan to come with them to the boat train at Waterloo to see her off. He kissed her goodbye through the carriage window, on the cheek she presented to him. The next time he saw her, the bombs were falling on London.