‘You could say I’ve become more of a performance artist,’ he said. ‘Lot easier. Better paid. More kudos.’
‘So, the talk this morning… that sort of thing is now your bread and butter.’
Allgood seemed to give this too some thought. Eventually, he said, ‘Yah,’ and lapsed into silence. Vicenza ordered a glass of the pink drink from a passing waiter. It was Campari and orange. Bognor, on duty, asked for a double espresso.
‘But the Reverend Sebastian wanted to be a writer,’ ventured Bognor. ‘Ended up on the slush pile. Felt rejected. Became depressed. Took his own life as a result.’
‘Did he?’ asked Allgood. ‘Fancy.’
‘You’re the one who said it. This morning. In your talk.’
‘Did I?’ Allgood might have been considering a completely different third party. ‘How odd. Did I have any evidence?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were getting out of his depth and had no water-wings. ‘Do you? Did you?’
‘Pass,’ he said, and then turned to Vicenza. ‘What do you think, darling?’
‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t there. Still sleeping it off.’
She simpered, leaving no one in any doubt what she meant by ‘it’. She was the ‘it’ girl of Mallborne, a bicycle soprano.
‘Natch,’ said Allgood. ‘Who said I said he wrote a book?’
‘Your audience,’ said Bognor. ‘They seemed to think you had inside knowledge.’
‘Not me,’ said the non-novelist. ‘If I seemed to suggest such a thing, I must have been talking hypothetically. Writers these days blur the edges between fact and fiction, in speech as well as on the page. I suppose it depends what you mean by truth.’
‘Yes,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were nearing home turf. The nature of truth was the sort of concept with which he was familiar. Truth, justice, right and wrong – these were the tools of his trade. His stock.
‘I sometimes feel,’ said Allgood, ‘that if you believe something sufficiently strongly, it assumes its own truth. It may be false, but it’s not because that’s not what you believe. Maybe I believe the reverend wrote a book. For me, that becomes a truth, even if it’s not shared. You may not accept what I say, and the Reverend Sebastian may not actually have put pen to paper. But that doesn’t invalidate my belief, nor my constructing a theory around that belief, even though the theory is based on sand. It’s my belief that’s important, not the actuality. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Not really,’ said Bognor, who was groping.
‘Too deep for me,’ said Vicenza. ‘Not that I care much.’ And she laughed throatily, like one who smoked.
‘It’s quite simple,’ said Allgood. ‘All I’m saying is that truth is relative. Most people think it’s an absolute, but I don’t agree. Apart from anything, it’s fantastically restricting. Once you accept that it’s a question of degree, it opens up any number of possibilities.’
‘You can’t expect me to think that,’ protested Bognor. ‘My whole job is predicated on the basis that the world is black and white, and there is such a thing as right and wrong, guilty and innocent. I am charged with seeking out criminals and bringing them to what we call justice.’
‘I’m glad you entered the caveat,’ said Allgood. ‘At least you appear to be capable of understanding that in real life things aren’t quite as simple as they have to be in your career.’
‘I question which of us is living in “real life”,’ said Bognor. ‘Mine feels pretty real to me.’
‘Touche,’ said Allgood. ‘Mine, likewise. Which just goes to prove the point I’m making. I’m not disparaging your reality, which is real for you; but mine is real for me too. And you should respect it.’
‘Except,’ said Bognor, ‘when you try to proselytize. You’re entitled to a skewed view of what’s real, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t try to inflict it on other people. You know perfectly well that your view of what happened to the Reverend Sebastian is, in our terms, a pure fabrication, but you tried to pretend that it was real in terms that my friends, your audience, understood.’
‘Now you’re being duplicitous,’ said Allgood. ‘I was arguing hypothetically, in your terms. I never pretended otherwise.’
‘That’s not my understanding,’ said Bognor. ‘Did Sebastian write a book? Did he submit it to publishers? Was it rejected?’
Allgood appeared to give this some thought, but when he came up with an answer it was as infuriating as Bognor had feared. It also took little or no account of what he had said hitherto.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe not.’
It was the sort of response an Apocrypha don would have produced in one of those infuriating tutorials which had nothing to do with the subject you were supposed to be studying, and everything to do with teaching you dialectic and the art of argument. Monica hated it, even though her own college had practised much the same.
‘Did the vicar write a book?’
A long silence. Eventually, Allgood said, ‘Not in the sense that would stand up in a court of law. I think he could perfectly well have written one, though. And if he had, he would have suffered serial rejections which would have undermined what was, by all accounts, a flimsy sense of self-confidence and self-worth. So, what I said makes perfect sense.’
‘But it’s a fiction,’ said Bognor, angrily.
‘That’s what I deal in,’ said Allgood evenly, ‘and there is a sense in which my fiction is truer than your fact, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘That’s not the point, as well you know.’
‘Oh, but I think it is,’ said Allgood. ‘Life is too literal. Actually, it’s a lot more interesting than plods like you make out.’
Bognor resented being described as a ‘plod’, but refused to rise and said nothing. He could do metaphysics but not professionally. Work was rooted in life and death, just as he believed that books should have beginnings and middles and ends, and anchovies helped out beef casseroles.
‘I don’t have a problem staying interested,’ he said, ‘and in the world I live in, a stiff is a stiff is a stiff, and it’s my job to see how and why a once breathing human can have reached that sorry state. As the meerkat says “simples”. It is too. And quite interesting enough, without injecting hypotheticals.’
‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ said Allgood. ‘It’s a point of view. Not one I happen to share, but a point of view nonetheless. I respect it. I just wish you’d do the same for mine.’
Bognor was exasperated.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have a job to do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to fantasize. Boring old black and white. Tiresome. Limiting. Not as good as writing a book, much less talking about it. But it’s what I do. So, can you just tell me. Did the late vicar write a book? Did he submit it to one or more publishers? Was it rejected?’
‘No,’ said Allgood. ‘Not in so many words. Not literally. Not as far as I know. It’s possible but I have no proof. As you’d describe it.’
‘So, you’ve been wasting my time?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Allgood, ‘but you said it.’
‘I could charge you with wasting official time,’ said Bognor pompously, ‘but I’ll let you off with a warning.’
‘Thank you, I’m sure’, said the novelist. ‘I’d prefer to think that we look at things in a different way. You see black and white and I see grey. I believe in murk, you believe in clarity. Different.’
Bognor reflected that Allgood could be right.
‘Anything I can do, just let me know,’ said Vicenza Book. She looked pert and tousled.
‘Likewise,’ said Allgood.
They raised their glasses.
Bognor wished life was so simple. He exited left.
Perhaps life and death were naturally murky, and his efforts to make them otherwise were necessarily doomed to failure.
Pity.
TWENTY-FOUR
There was a convention involving butlers, but Bognor was damned if he could remember what it was. This may have had something to do with the diminishing number of butlers, who were a dying breed, even if one included the ersatz butlers employed by a certain sort of celebrity hotel in such places as Dubai. Or it may have had to do with Bognor’s natural forgetfulness, or his belief that neither conventions nor butlers mattered much. Either the butler dunnit or he hadn’t. He was either the most suspicious character or the least. Whatever, he had to be interviewed, together with his wife, who in this case, did.