Chapter XXII Martin
XXII.
Martin
THE DINING ROOM AT TIPWORTH. No kitchen spaghetti bolognese on this occasion.
I am seated to the right of our hostess, in prime position.
Uniformed staff are serving shining plates of medium-rare venison in white gloves.
The table is set with the best silverware.
Candlelight casts prismatic patterns from crystal wine glasses.
A soft glinting shimmer falls like silent confetti across the starched cloth.
There are a dozen guests, none of whom I recognise.
In the aftermath of Ben’s arrest, old alliances have dissolved and new ones have sprouted in their place.
Serena has told me most of the guests are business colleagues or local acquaintances who have proved ‘very loyal’.
On my right is a young man, olive-skinned and good-looking with heavy eyebrows, who introduces himself as Alexander.
When I press him on his connection to the Fitzmaurices, he says that he’s one of their private bankers.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘How interesting.’
‘Not really,’ Alexander says in an American accent. ‘My parents are South Asian, by way of Long Island, and the only acceptable professions are doctor, lawyer, accountant or engineer. Of course, I’ve failed them terribly. But they tolerate me as a kind-of accountant.’
Alexander has a pleasant twinkle to his face. His thigh grazes mine. I think I will enjoy sitting next to him.
Serena leans across to offer me the mustard, piled high in a tiny silver boat with a matching spoon, each item exquisite in its minuteness.
‘It means so much to us both that you could come, Martin,’ she says.
She is wearing her hair up and the bones of her face are more pronounced than before.
Her dress is black, with a strapless neckline and her collarbones stick out with an angularity that strikes me as both elegant and painful.
‘We really do need our friends around us now more than ever.’
‘Of course,’ I say, my voice suitably solemn. ‘You can count on me.’
I give a little bow of my head, just to press the point home.
I glance up to find Ben gazing at me from across the table.
Lady Katherine is next to him, looking ever more like a haughty skeleton.
He smiles when I meet his eye and raises his glass.
I raise mine in return. Nothing more needs to be said.
I arrived this afternoon, a few hours before the other guests, as requested.
I brought with me a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem and a bunch of snapdragons after deliberating with assiduous care over what gifts to purchase.
The wine was one of the most expensive bottles in my local delicatessen and I knew Ben liked Sauternes.
The flowers were in season and tastefully bound in ribbon and paper from a Cambridge florist. In the past, I had misstepped by being too obvious with gifts, too on the nose, too try-hard.
Today, Serena accepted my offerings with a quick smile and even leaned in to smell the flowers. Success!
‘You shouldn’t have, Martin,’ she said, passing the snapdragons to the silent Susan who cut the stems and arranged them expertly in a vase.
Ben took me for a walk in the grounds. I didn’t come prepared, so he lent me wellington boots and a Barbour jacket, which stank of wet dog hair even though they don’t have a dog.
As he sat on the hallway bench to put on his own wellies, I noticed the black ankle tag he wore as a condition of his bail.
‘Looks like a fitness tracker, doesn’t it?’ he said, hitching up his trouser leg and trying to make a joke of it, but his embarrassment was too marked to be disguised with levity.
‘The new Apple Watch,’ I said.
‘Ha ha. Exactly.’
It feels redundant to write that Ben had changed since I’d last seen him, but I was taken aback by how extreme the change had been.
The vigour had gone. He no longer carried with him that sense of knowing exactly what was about to happen and how he might control it.
He had once been so certain about the world.
Now, I saw, the certainty had dissipated, to be replaced with mystification.
He was casting around for reassurance and I felt something I had never experienced before in relation to Ben: I felt pity.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ he kept saying as we strode out along the gravelled driveway. ‘I can’t believe it.’
His conversation was repetitive and circular, often fixating on some relatively minor point of contention. He was obsessed with the fact, for instance, that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Clare Dunstable, had not reached out to him since his arrest.
‘I mean, I invited her to Tipworth for tea after she was appointed,’ he said indignantly. ‘She hasn’t so much as texted me.’
It was disarming watching him unspool in front of me, to witness his dawning understanding that none of the old Fitzmaurice swagger meant anything anymore.
He was yesterday’s man. Today, no one was paying obsequious homage to ensure his patronage.
In fact, they were all distancing themselves – all those posh, monied public schoolers who had filled the hallways and rooms of this great house; all the heads of industry, the hedge-funders, the clay-pigeon shooters and padel players who had snorted Ben’s cocaine at parties and accepted his invitations to Puglia; all the art collectors and interior decorators who had taken Serena’s cash in exchange for chandeliers and Carrara marble bath-tubs; all the organic beauty moguls, the hoteliers, the faded aristos, the politicians, the supermodels and actors and PR bosses; all those liars who had once revelled in other people’s largesse were now scuttling away like rats.
I could see it. But Ben couldn’t yet. He seemed more concerned with the betrayal of Richard Take (‘that puffed-up little twat’) than he did with the looming court case and the fact that he’d been charged with offences committed under the 2010 Bribery Act.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said again, shaking his head and almost tripping over a divot in the ground.
‘It is unbelievable,’ I said, meaning precisely the opposite.
We walked towards the oak forest. My boots were slightly too big for my feet and left clumsy indentations in the grass. I could feel the prickling start of a blister on my left ankle.
‘Dominic thinks I’ll go to prison,’ Ben said. ‘I mean, he says it’ll only be a matter of months and I’ll be out before I know it, but …’
He lets the thought trail and picks up a stick from the ground. He wipes the moisture off its bark, then uses the stick to thrash through the undergrowth.
‘Anyway,’ thrash, swing, thrash, ‘it’ll take months apparently,’ thrash, swing, thrash, ‘there’s a backlog in the criminal justice system.’
Yes, I wanted to add, because of cuts and underfunding by your government. But there was no point picking an argument now. What could he do?
‘If you go to prison, I’ll visit you,’ I said.
‘Thanks, mate.’
‘And I can keep an eye on things here. Look after Serena and the children.’
‘Appreciate it,’ Ben said, stopping now to lean on his stick and look up at the clearing sky. ‘We were so grateful you took care of Cosima after all that … nonsense.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
I looked up too, following his sightline. A hawk circled in the sky above us.
‘She’s in Bali now, you know?’
I made a non-committal sound of surprise.
‘Just thinking of what happened to Fliss out there makes me so—’
His voice broke. I gave him a pat on the back. He still didn’t fully seem to connect what had happened to Fliss with his own actions. Ben had always possessed the ability to blame others for their flaws while interpreting his own as necessary strengths.
We pressed on through the trees and then cut westwards along a narrow path, emerging on the edge of the lake.
Ben had insisted on a lake being dug out as soon as they moved to Tipworth.
He wanted something that reminded him of boyhood swims in the dappled waters of the Lower Lake at Denby Hall.
It had taken two years to build this one and it was a failure.
The water was silty and stagnant. The natural vegetation had not yet grown back, lending the area a post-apocalyptic feel.
We stood on a mound of dirt and stared across the lake’s surface and Ben told me they were putting trout in next week and I could find nothing to say in response.
I had no interesting freshwater fish facts to draw upon.
We lapsed into silence. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
‘Well, LS,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come today and I’m glad we’ve had this moment to ourselves because there’s something we need to talk about.’
Fuck.
This was it, I thought to myself. The moment of uncovering.
I contemplated scarpering. Absurd, of course. I knew I wouldn’t get far with my blister and my oversized wellington boots. Besides, where would I go? The Tipworth estate ran to 400 acres.
‘I owe you an apology.’
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.
‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘An apology, LS. For everything that happened in the past. I took your loyalty for granted. I treated you abominably. And the only way I can explain it is to say that I had someone dripping poison in my ear throughout. I fear this person completely warped my view of you and made me feel you were the viper in the nest when, in fact, as we now know, it was him.’
A thundering sound in my ears.
‘I don’t quite follow …’