‘How many books has old Fenwick written?’
‘I don’t know. He’s never been able to get anything published, I don’t think. Well, now he’s got Roderick’s money, things may change. He seemed terribly excited about it.’
‘Don’t tell me he’s contemplating vanity publishing?’
‘I believe he is.’
‘Waste of money.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes. Utter waste of money.’
What an uninspiring conversation we are having, Clarissa thought. For the last five minutes she had been trying to will her lover to reach out and lay his hand over hers …
‘Gerard is very keen on founding what he calls a small but exclusive press,’ she said. ‘He did try to get Roderick interested. He kept asking Roderick for funds. Roderick never said no; he strung Gerard along. He enjoyed teasing his brother. Poor Gerard kept writing to him — phoning him — kept leaving messages. I don’t think Roderick ever answered his calls.’
Sylvester-Sale raised the wine glass to his lips. ‘Actually he rang him the day before he died.’
‘Roderick rang Gerard? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. On his mobile.’
‘How terribly peculiar.’
‘We were on the terrace. Your late husband, Basil and I. Your late husband said, I am going to ring my brother now. He then said some truly awful things into the phone. It was terribly embarrassing for us, listening to his side of the conversation. Your late husband was showing off. He kept winking at us. He enjoyed having an audience.’
‘My late husband was the worst exhibitionist who ever lived.’
‘That night at dinner — the night he died. I still can’t believe the things he said.’ Sylvester-Sale shook his head. ‘About the glorious sixties and his escapades — that story about the debs and their jewels! What a cad! Poor you.’ He reached out and put his hand over hers. At long last!
‘It was horrid.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Horrid. In front of everybody! To be told that-’ She broke off. ‘I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. I felt debased. I didn’t know where to look. I truly wished him dead at that moment.’
‘Well, your wish was granted. He died an hour and a half later.’ Sylvester-Sale removed his hand.
‘Syl, there is something I … What if I told you …’
‘If you told me what?’
‘Nothing. Nothing!’ If only I were sure he loved me, I would tell him the truth, she thought. ‘What exactly did Roderick say to Gerard on the phone?’
‘Some horribly personal things. Um. About Gerard’s singular lack of talent and enterprise. He referred to some incident in their childhood. He also asked Gerard to come and murder him.’
‘Murder him?’
‘Yes!’
‘What did he say exactly?’
Sylvester-Sale cleared his throat. ‘Of course, dear boy, most of my earthly riches will be all yours to keep one day, no question about it, but you may have to wait some time — I may live to be a hundred, you know. Unless you kill me?’
She laughed. ‘How spooky! You sound exactly like him!’
‘That would be a solution, yes, most definitely a solution. Why don’t you come over, dear boy? Hop on the next plane and pay us a visit, now why don’t you? Have it out with me? Challenge me to a duel! Show that you are a real Remnant? Well, you know where to find me.’
22
The hands were round her throat now and the ghastly grinning face was very close to hers. She had seen the hands first and, even before the face revealed itself to her, she knew it was Lord Remnant’s.
The coffin stood beside her bed, parallel to it. It was a white coffin and it gleamed in the dull glow of the moon, which gave her bedroom an unearthly appearance. She had seen the lid sliding open, slowly and without a sound. Then the hands showed, lit by the moon-
Well, he knew how to do it. He had been reading about it; she had seen the ancient book on resurrecting the dead on his desk.
Lord Remnant had come back from the grave.
No, he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. He had never been inside a grave. He had been cremated. His ashes were in an urn somewhere at Remnant.
She had recognized the hands. That was how she had known at once it was him. There was the nasty red weal between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, where Stephan had stabbed him.
But-
Louise Hunter woke up with a gasp. Her heart was racing.
A dream. It was only a dream, thank God. She had had a bad dream. It was very early in the morning, pitch dark, raindrops drumming against the window panes, wind whining in the chimney -
She got out of bed, making it creak horribly. She put on her dressing gown and then wrapped a blanket round her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering. She felt disoriented. Her ankles were swollen. We are no sooner aloft than we begin to feel gravity’s inevitable pull. It occurred to her that she was much cleverer than anyone ever realized.
She stood beside the window. She thought she could just about distinguish the stunted trees writhing and struggling as if in agony.
Suddenly she knew what it was that had been bothering her all this time.
It had come back to her.
There hadn’t been a weal on his hand when he died.
Gerard Fenwick, who had also woken up early, sat at his desk, writing in his diary.
A journey into the unknown, that’s what a novel should be. There is pleasure to be derived from following a novelist on a voyage of exploration, one in which the style reflects uncertainties, a novel written as if it were in answer to the question, ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said?’
There is equal pleasure, if of a different order, that comes from a novelist who uses events not to change characters, but to reveal them. If one style, hesitating, probing, mazy, is suited to one kind of novel, then a different style, lucid, terse and epigrammatic, fits another.
I have now tried everything, or almost everything. I have written in the plainest and most cliched, weary man-of-the-world manner, such as Somerset Maugham’s. I have attempted Hemingway’s short, simple sentences, clear as a mountain stream. I have written in the style of a vacuous viscount out of Wodehouse. I have produced writing that is impossible to understand because it is oblique without really being very suggestive. I also have had the temerity to try to write like Monsieur Proust — in long, stately sentences, magnificently tortuous and full of qualifications — a style like a lush if overgrown garden full of unexpected delights.
I have even started a modern version of one of those gloomy Greek dramas with the Eumenides lurking outside ready to make their entrance.
The only intolerable style is one that draws attention to itself and distracts from the matter.
For some reason I keep thinking of detective stories, maybe because of that bloody tape, though I don’t really see myself actually starting to write one. I hate the idea of formulas, which are as predictable as they are banal. In my opinion, detective stories of the ‘traditional’ kind do little more than repetitively tread their own sorry cliches.
The setting: a cosy English village, a luxuriously exotic villa on a private island, or some decaying castle not unlike Remnant. A plot that depends on a certain person ordering scrambled eggs in the middle of the day, then slipping on discarded mandarin peel as a yellow Rolls roars by and certain other seemingly irrelevant accidents all aligning miraculously at the end.
A highly unsympathetic victim, someone like my late brother, so that no reader should be tempted to weep for him. Suspects stumbling across the chessboard strictly according to the ‘rules of the game’. And finally the denouement in the library, which of course is a symbol of mankind’s futile search for mysteries. Why the library? Why not the stables or the wine cellar, the butler’s pantry or, for that matter, the bell tower?