Dear Mr Lincoln,
I have received a cable from Nerissa Cavesey asking me to invite you to dinner. My wife and I would be pleased to entertain you during your visit, if you would care to accept.
Nerissa is the sister of my late brother’s wife, Portia, and has become close to us through her visits to our country. I explain this, as Mr Clifford Wenkins of Worldic Cinemas, who very reluctantly informed me of your whereabouts, was most insistent that you would not welcome any private invitations.
Yours sincerely,
Behind the stiffly polite sentences, one could feel the irritation with which he had written that note. It was not only I, it seemed, who would do things slightly against their will, for Nerissa’s sake: and Clifford Wenkins, with his fussing misjudgement of his responsibilities, had clearly not improved the situation.
I went over to the telephone beside the bed and put a call through to the number printed alongside the address on the writing-paper.
The call was answered by a black voice who said she would see if Mr van Huren was home.
Mr van Huren decided he was.
‘I called to thank you for your letter,’ I said. ‘And to say that I would very much like to accept your invitation to dine with you, during my stay.’ Two, I reckoned, could be ultra polite.
His voice was as firm as his handwriting, and equally reserved.
‘Good.’ He didn’t sound overjoyed, however. ‘It is always a pleasure to please Nerissa.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
There was a pause. The conversation could hardly be said to be rocketing along at a scintillating rate.
I said helpfully, ‘I shall be here until a week next Wednesday.’
‘I see. Yes. However, I shall be away from home all next week, and we are already engaged this Saturday and Sunday...’
‘Then please don’t worry,’ I said.
He cleared his throat. ‘I suppose,’ he suggested doubtfully, ‘that you would not be free tomorrow? Or, indeed, this evening? My house is not far from the Iguana Rock... but of course I expect you are fully engaged.’
Tomorrow morning, I thought, all the newspapers would be flourishing a paragraph or two about Roderick Hodge’s girl friend. By tomorrow night, Mrs van Huren, if she felt like it, could fill her house with the sort of party I didn’t like to go to. And tomorrow night I had agreed to have dinner with Conrad, though I could change that if I had to.
I said, ‘If it is not too short notice, tonight would be fine.’
‘Very well, then. Shall we say eight o’clock? I’ll send my car to fetch you.’
I put down the receiver half regretting that I had said I would go, as his pleasure in my acceptance was about as intense as a rice-pudding. However, the alternatives seemed to be the same as the night before: either dine in the Iguana Rock restaurant with the sideways glances reaching me from the other tables, or upstairs alone in my room, wishing I was home with Charlie.
The house to which the van Hurens’ car took me was big, old, and spelled money from the marble doorstep onwards. The hall was large, with the ceiling soaring away into invisibility, and round all four sides there was a graceful colonnade of pillars and arches: it looked like a small, splendid Italian piazza, with a roof somewhere over the top.
Into the hall, from a door under the colonnade on the far side, came a man and a woman.
‘I am Quentin van Huren,’ he said. ‘And this is my wife Vivi.’
‘How do you do?’ I said politely, and shook their hands.
There was a small hiatus.
‘Yes... well,’ he said, making a gesture which was very nearly a shrug. ‘Come along in.’
I followed them into the room they had come from. In the clearer light there, Quentin van Huren was instantly identifiable as a serious man of substance, since about him clung that unmistakable aura of know-how, experience, and ability that constitutes true authority. As solidity and professionalism were qualities I felt at home with, I was immediately prepared to like him more than it seemed probable he would like me.
His wife Vivi was not the same: elegant-looking, but not in the same league intellectually.
She said, ‘Do sit down, Mr Lincoln. We are so pleased you could come. Nerissa is such a very dear friend...’
She had cool eyes and a highly practised social manner. There was less warmth in her voice than in her words.
‘Whiskey?’ van Huren asked, and I said ‘Thank you,’ and got the tumbler full of water with the tablespoon of Scotch.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of your films,’ van Huren said, without sounding in the least sorry about it, and his wife added, ‘We seldom go to the cinema.’
‘Very wise,’ I said without inflection, and neither of them knew quite how to take it.
I found it easier on the whole to deal with people intent on taking me down a peg rather than with the sycophantically over-flattering. Towards the snubbers I felt no obligation.
I sat down on the gold-brocaded sofa which she had indicated, and sipped my enervated drink.
‘Has Nerissa told you she is... ill?’ I asked.
They both sat without haste. Van Huren shifted a small cushion out of his way, twisting in his armchair to see what he was doing, and answered over his shoulder.
‘She wrote a little while ago. She said she had something wrong with her glands.’
‘She’s dying,’ I said flatly, and got from them their first genuine response. They stopped thinking about me. Thought about Nerissa. About themselves. The shock and regret in their faces was real.
Van Huren still held the cushion in his hand.
‘Are you sure?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘She told me herself. A month or two, she says, is all she has.’
‘Oh no,’ Vivi said, her grief showing through the social gloss like a thistle among orchids.
‘I can’t believe it,’ van Huren exclaimed. ‘She is always so full of life. So gay. So vital.’
I thought of Nerissa as I had left her: vitality gone and life itself draining away.
‘She is worried about her racehorses,’ I said. ‘The ones Portia left her.’
Neither of them was ready to think about racehorses. Van Huren shook his head, finished putting the cushion comfortably in his chair, and stared into space. He was a well-built man, at a guess in his fifties, with hair going neatly grey in distinguished wings above his ears. Seen in profile his nose was strongly rounded outwards from the bridge, but stopped straight and short with no impression of a hook. He had a firm, full-lipped, well-defined mouth, hands with square well-manicured nails, and a dark grey suit over which someone had taken a lot of trouble.
The door from the hall opened suddenly and a boy and a girl, quite remarkably alike, came in. He, about twenty, had the slightly sullen air of one whose feelings of rebellion had not carried him as far as actually leaving his palatial home. She, about fifteen, had the uncomplicated directness of one to whom the idea of rebellion had not yet occurred.
‘Oh sorry,’ she said. ‘Didn’t know we had anyone for dinner.’ She came across the room in her jeans and a pale yellow tee-shirt, with her brother behind her dressed very much the same.
Van Huren said, ‘This is my son Jonathan, and my daughter Sally...’
I stood up to shake hands with the girl, which seemed to amuse her.
‘I say,’ she said. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you look like Edward Lincoln?’