They'll never manage her de selection
"Of course not. She could gain re-election in this constituency with an illegitimate child being breast-fed on the hustings!" When their laugher had diminished, Winterborne added more gravely: "But it's this sometimes needless upsetting of people, her urge to trample on pretensions they have cultivated as carefully as rare orchids. Even someone with lights as dim as those possessed by dear George often knows when he's being patronised or mocked. It doesn't achieve anything so why does she go in for it with such enthusiasm?" He threw his hands in the air in mock despair.
"Just consider the inordinate amount of time she must spend with the dim, the venal, the unprincipled and the boring," Aubrey observed, enjoying their patrician dialogue.
"When she returns from the Mother of Parliaments, that choicest Palace of Westminster, you can't really blame her for bridling at a great deal more of the same."
"I ask only for a little common sense," Winterborne offered with a smile.
"Ah, our dear Marian was born not so much with common sense but with an ethical sense a more combustible property altogether."
"Exactly. It could blow her sky-high some fine day and I would hate that to happen."
"Quite," Aubrey murmured, masking his features with the whisky tumbler.
Clive glanced away towards the library windows and the door again thankfully.
For Marian was engaged in one of her explosive experiments. Light the blue touch paper and retire. It served as a warning against Marian's curiosity as much as against the combustibility of fireworks. Her notion of the kind of fraud in which David could be involved if it bore fruit would indeed undermine her as well as David and Clive, and blow them all at the moon. Did she understand how dangerous her enquiries were… to her past, her sense of well-being, to some of the scaffolding of her personality?
He knew Marian well enough to experience a slight, unnerved nausea which he could not blame on the sun's strength or the second whisky.
More immediately, there was a very real personal danger in her pursuing her investigation. Which was why he had told her little of what he had discovered since their last meeting. To have stilled her ardent intelligence would have been beyond him. He would have had to lie to her, and she would have known it. Nevertheless, she had little idea how close his own suspicions now were to those she held.
And that weakened him, in front of Clive, because the truth would destroy their friendship, would alienate Marian and her father from Clive and Uffingham.
Marian, given free rein, would pull the whole edifice of their various relationships down. Aubrey's concern perhaps his sole concern was how he might mitigate the blow.
His nerves were startled as David and his guests emerged from the door on to the terrace, blinking in the sunlight like conspirators. Clive waved a lazy arm, then stood up, calling out: "At last, gentlemen! Not a single healthy appetite among you, by the look of it!" The butler, as at a given signal, emerged to take their drinks order.
"Champagne, I think, Russell," Aubrey heard David announce.
"Not premature, I feel." He was smiling broadly, confidently. It was like sunlight after cloud, a sense of better weather; how could there be any villainy here?
Easily… In Aubrey's perspective remained something Marian's eager moral nose had scented then forgotten Fraser worked for David, or at least he probably did, and there was a young man being buried in Somerset whom Fraser had probably killed.
"Champagne, Kenneth?" David called to him. He rose with an awkward hurry, waggling his hand in refusal.
"Not after Scotch, dear boy thank you."
David shrugged, his mood undisturbed. There was an ease among the group of men that had not been Aubrey's sense of them previously. There had been strain, an edginess. Perhaps Bressier, the chairman of the French aerospace company, had brought saving news? There was now tentative, and accumulating, interest in the Skyliner, albeit they were practically giving the aircraft away with boxes of cereal in their leasing arrangements. So someone had informed him at the Club, a leading economic journalist. Whatever had occurred, there was now the scent of relief, even success.
"Beautiful day, Kenneth," David announced, raising his champagne flute in an ironic toast. The swans glided on the still, glittering lake as if nothing could ever disturb them.
"Absolutely. I gather your self-satisfaction quotient is higher today than yesterday," he murmured, watching the swans glide in and out of focus amid the gleam of the water.
"Ah trust you to notice," David replied carefully.
"I can admit to you, Kenneth, that things haven't been good the past few weeks and months. Culminating in the helicopter fiasco," he added with deep vehemence.
"But Aero UK and BalzacStendhal have adopted my leasing policy and the planes are beginning to move out of the two factories. Once they're flying well, who knows?"
"Indeed who knows?"
"Come and meet everyone most of them you already know, I should imagine."
"Some, certainly."
Aubrey shook hands with Rogier and Bressier, addressing them in his correct but fluent French. In their own language, he could detect more easily and certainly their relief, a certain new lightness of mood.
Bryan Coulthard was bluffly, openly confident. Laxton, with all the assiduity of someone who learned nothing and forgot less, especially every petty enmity of his long and undistinguished career, was patronising; amused at Aubrey's old-fashioned suit and his remittance-man status at Uffingham. As a mere house guest of Clive, he did not merit the rank accorded to those who came to do business with David. Laxton glowed with the fleshiness of seized opportunities in Brussels, though drink seemed to be re mapping his features as a chart of his veins. He perspired freely, but even that seemed suggestive of confidence.
Aubrey murmured of mutual acquaintances and recent deaths and the importance of Europe with Laxton, much to the amusement of Clive over the man's padded shoulder. A little business with Coulthard, whose replies suggested that he had emerged into a clearing. There was minimal sense of the pressure of creditors, of the stock market…
Shares in Aero UK had climbed back slightly with news of Skyliners being leased. Aubrey, in his selfish wish to dissuade Marian and avoid the conflagration the truth would bring, began to feel more comfortable, affable even towards Laxton. If the necessity for villainy had ceased, if whatever they had been doing was an episode now closed, then perhaps, just perhaps, Marian would be satisfied with knowledge without action.
He found himself once more beside Rogier, who leaned deferentially over him.
The man was well over six feet, still slim, groomed, narrow-featured, the gold framed spectacles and bow tie making him seem more academic than his reputation suggested, less the skilful politician; a form of disguise, then. Europe, of course, moved from strength to strength, and Aubrey did not demur, largely indifferent as he was to Europhilia and Europhobia alike. He anticipated that the bureaucrats would, as bureaucrats always manage to do in situations where they do not possess the freedom to do wrong, make an unholy, scrappy mess of federalism. He nodded and smiled and allowed the Euro-blandishments to vanish beyond his ears, towards the lake.
Then he said, as a sense of ennui assailed him, and almost to deflect the conversation: "I imagine the suicide of that young man in your department was most embarrassing, Commissioner? I didn't know him personally, but a friend of mine did…"
Rogier's features were blanched. Aubrey made a huge effort of will to render his own face bland.
The real truth of the thing was murder and this man knew it for what it was and all possibility of dissuading Marian vanished in that hard light. Lloyd had been murdered by Fraser on David Winterborne's direct order, in all probability.