VI. Martin #4
‘I told you,’ Derek says, his breath grazing my ear. ‘Her brother said she weren’t sober. But she were. She were drinking a bit, you know, but nothing else. She had the drugs under control.’
Ben is back in his seat now and the vicar is asking us all to pray. I attempt to shush Derek by dropping my head in a suitably worshipful pose, but he’s still talking to me in an urgent whisper.
‘She killed herself, man, I told you.’
I’m not your man, I think, but something about his insistence is compelling. If Fliss was sober and if she deliberately walked into that sea to drown herself in the night currents, then why on earth were the Fitzmaurices lying about it?
Trust me, I didn’t intend to stay for the reception.
You might not believe me, given my past predilection for inserting myself wherever I could into Fitzmaurice business, but it’s true.
I thought I would come to the funeral, show Ben I was no longer scared of him, satisfy what remained of my morbid curiosity and then return to the cottage and the cat and the quiet lecturing life.
I couldn’t have known it was Serena who’d sent the invitation, or that I was going to sit next to Derek or that the confluence of these two unexpected revelations would result in a suspicion – no, it was stronger than that: an absolute certainty that the Fitzmaurices were trying to bury the truth in that freshly dug grave.
So of course I have to stay. I want to know what happens next. Don’t you?
Outside the chapel, the sun streams weakly onto the lawn.
We stand sombrely in small groups gathered around ornamental topiary and are served glasses of champagne by bow-tied waiters.
It seems odd to be serving champagne at a wake, but there you have it.
The family members have all disappeared – one assumes to bury the body.
Although, now that I think of it, there is a Fitzmaurice mausoleum in the bowels of the chapel.
Does one bury bodies in mausoleums? (Should it be mausolea?) Or does one cremate, then place the ashes in a ceremonial urn to be placed under a marble gravestone?
I can’t imagine Fliss would have wanted this.
An eco-friendly cardboard cradle, disintegrating underneath freshly planted carbon-neutral trees would be more her style.
A waiter offers me a smoked salmon blini. I take it. He smiles at me. I frown, remembering the smile and touch and lips of a different waiter at a different party a long time ago. I always did have a thing for staff. I eat the blini in two bites and wipe my hands on the paper napkin.
‘Ah, hello there!’
I find myself accosted by Richard Take. I have never met him before, despite the jovial familiarity of his greeting.
‘Good afternoon,’ I reply, with what I hope is inescapable finality.
‘Beautiful service, wasn’t it?’
I say nothing.
‘Very moving,’ he continues. And then he mimics exactly what Ben did and presses the knuckle of his thumb to a dry eye. ‘Dear me. It really does make one think.’
I remove my spectacles and wipe the lenses on the edge of my jacket.
‘Yes,’ I say, putting my glasses back on. ‘Most things do.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Richard Take’s plump, pastry-fed face is blurred with confusion.
‘Make one think. Most things.’
‘Ah, yes, I see what you mean, ha!’ He gesticulates wildly with his champagne flute, liquid spilling onto his pale blue tie as he does so. ‘I’m Richard, by the way.’ He proffers a damp hand. ‘Richard Take.’
‘Martin Gilmour.’
‘And how do you know …?’
‘I’m Ben’s best friend from school.’
If human ears actually did prick, Richard’s would, at that moment, have been a world-leading exemplar of the genre.
‘Oh. Oh, I see. Goodness. So you must know Andrew Jarvis too, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s here somewhere – I must say hello.’
Richard Take scans the crowd as the spectre of Andrew Jarvis raises itself from the crypt of my memories. Jarvis bullied me at school. At Cambridge, he repeatedly tried to turn Ben against me. He managed it, in the end. He and Ben are still close while I – well, we know what happened to me.
‘Great stuff, great stuff,’ Richard Take says now, grasping for something – anything – to fill the silence. I, enjoying his discomfort, refuse to help him. ‘Ah. Yes. Hmm.’
A waitress interrupts with a tray of dark red slugs which she tells us are mini-beetroot roulades.
Richard takes one and immediately his fingers are stained purple.
When he adjusts his tie, a smear of beetroot makes its way onto the cheap nylon.
How does a man like this end up with his flaccid buttocks pressed so firmly against the seat of power?
‘So,’ I say. ‘You lost your job.’
‘Oh. Ah. Yes. Well, not quite lost. I’m still on the, ah, backbenches.’
‘Why did you do it?’
I decide I want to make this exchange as excruciating as possible so that he leaves me alone.
Richard shuffles uneasily.
‘You mean …?’
‘The porn.’
He is glancing around now, desperate to make his escape.
‘Is that Edgar Grimes, I really must—’
‘No, that’s not him,’ I say. ‘Why would you watch porn on your work computer?’
I’m not trying to be obtuse, honestly. I just want to know how someone could be so stupid.
‘Look, you mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers.’ He emphasises each word with flattened, upward-facing palms, as if he, too, is offering a tray of canapés. ‘It was an error of judgement. One I’ve apologised for. What red-blooded man hasn’t found himself in a moment of weakness where—’
‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I haven’t ever watched porn on a work computer.’
He swallows. I watch his Adam’s apple slide under his skin.
‘Well, I don’t know … maybe you aren’t governed by the same – ah – urges as the rest of us.’
I understand his implication. He sees me understanding it and starts making his excuses.
‘Good to meet you, Martin. I must go and pay my respects to Lady Katherine, now that I see her over there. What a loss. I can’t even imagine …’
He leaves, spouting platitudes and I am alone again, thank God.
I leave my empty champagne flute on the grass and decide to go on a wander, for old times’ sake.
I retrace my steps through the gardens and I see Lady Katherine, now cornered by Richard Take near the rose bushes.
She is physically stepping back from him.
He is still talking with outstretched hands and as I pass near them, I catch him saying, ‘… what red-blooded man …’
I have no intention of saving her. Frosty old bitch.
The side entrance is exactly how I remember it: hidden by fronds of ivy and easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there.
The door has been left on the latch. I slip inside.
The hallway is cool and smells of synthetic floral floor cleaner.
I walk past the service kitchen on the left, and the boot room on the right.
I keep going into the heart of the house until the flagstones become carpet and the walls gradually fill with ancestral portraits.
Just outside the dining room, where I sat through many stilted meals as a boy (tepid soup; overcooked lamb), there is a series of still-life studies of dead pheasants and blocks of cheese, all of them brownish in tone, the original colours trapped underneath centuries of dirt and ageing varnish.
They were like this when I used to visit and have got filthier in the intervening years.
The Fitzmaurices never thought to get them cleaned, I suppose, or are simply too cheap to do so.
On a console table, there is a nice silver flower bowl, scallop-edged and probably worth more than my annual salary, but it has been filled with artificial flowers, plastic petals edged with dust.
I hear voices coming from the study. I approach more cautiously, taking care not to tread on the floorboards I know will creak. I can make out Ben’s low tones – I would know his cadence anywhere.
‘No, no, I quite understand,’ he is saying. ‘Please, you don’t need to explain. I know how it is.’
I gather, from the ensuing silence, that he is on the phone.
‘You can imagine. Very emotional, yes.’
He coughs, then there’s a thudding sound, as if a glass has been placed back on a coaster.
‘Look, I’m just relieved the press coverage has been fairly respectful, all things considered … Mm … Quite … No, that’s quite right.’
He’s talking as though he’s giving a speech or a witness statement.
There is none of the relaxed joshing that I recall from years past. In the late 90s, at the height of our friendship, Ben attempted to reinvent himself, dropping his glottal stops to sound like a man of the people.
He started wearing trainers, and T-shirts under suit jackets with rolled-up sleeves.
That particular pose lasted well into his late thirties, until he began nurturing his political ambition in earnest and we stopped being friends.
This version of Ben is new to me: more grown-up, more suited to the times.
The country survived the pandemic and is now in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, created by Edward Buller and his acolytes.
Ben has remoulded himself to appear serious, statesmanlike and reassuring, although he’s been as guilty as the rest of them.
It’s very convincing to the untrained observer, but I know – because surely I do still, at some level, know him?
– that this sheen has been nicely buffed up for his own self-advancement.
‘That’s very kind, Ed,’ I can hear Ben saying now. Of course. He’s talking to the Prime Minister. So one presumes Buller didn’t turn up after all. Come to think of it, I didn’t see his corpulent form or unruly mop of hair anywhere.
‘I will,’ Ben is saying. ‘Yes, it’s in the diary and I’m looking forward to strategising.’ There is another thud of a glass on a desk and then he laughs. ‘Righto. Until then.’