In his last years, Ronnie had a single obsession. It was directed at a piece of land outside London, in a designated “green belt” area where builders were forbidden to intrude. Nevertheless, by means we can only guess at, Ronnie obtained the local council’s planning permission for his piece of green belt, and on the strength of it he negotiated a mammoth deal with one of the country’s largest construction companies, entitling them to build God knows how many houses on what would otherwise have been common land. The promised sum was huge, and I’m sure Ronnie ran up corresponding debts in anticipation of it, for his policy was to spend today what you hope to earn tomorrow.
But there was one snag. Local protest groups became vocal and unpleasant. Aware that it was on shaky ground, the council caved in and withdrew its planning permission, upon which the construction company understandably refused to pay the astronomic sum that had been negotiated. Several times in the years that followed Ronnie tried to persuade me to put up money for legal fees so that he could pursue the matter in the courts but, as always when he asked me to finance his projects, I refused, restricting my offer of support to maintenance and accommodation. But such proposals cut no ice with him. “You’re paying me to sit on my arse,” he would protest indignantly, and indeed I was. Yet somehow he got the cash together and fought the case, probably by offering the lawyers a slice of the action, which in those days was illegal. He won, but was dead before he could witness his triumph. It was in any case short-lived. No sooner had the court found in Ronnie’s favour than a hitherto mute lawyer rose to his feet and, revealing himself to be the arm of the Inland Revenue, collared every last penny of the spoils.
I have quoted Graham Greene a thousand times: childhood is the credit balance of the novelist. Ronnie liked to boast that he had never read a book in his life, including mine, but Greene’s dictum would have pleased him nonetheless. It was always Ronnie’s claim that without him I would have been nothing. And probably, in ways I prefer not to think of, he was right.
CHAPTER 1
In the small hours of a blustery October morning in a south Devon coastal town that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants, Magnus Pym got out of his elderly country taxicab and, having paid the driver and waited till he had left, struck out across the church square. His destination was a terrace of ill-lit Victorian boarding-houses with names like Bel-a-Vista, The Commodore and Eureka. In build he was powerful but stately, a representative of something. His stride was agile, his body forward-sloping in the best tradition of the Anglo-Saxon administrative class. In the same attitude, whether static or in motion, Englishmen have hoisted flags over distant colonies, discovered the sources of great rivers, stood on the decks of sinking ships. He had been travelling in one way or another for sixteen hours but he wore no overcoat or hat. He carried a fat black briefcase of the official kind and in the other hand a green Harrods bag. A strong sea wind lashed at his city suit, salt rain stung his eyes, balls of spume skimmed across his path. Pym ignored them. Reaching the porch of a house marked “No Vacancies” he pressed the bell and waited, first for the outside light to go on, then for the chains to be unfastened from inside. While he waited a church clock began striking five. As if in answer to its summons Pym turned on his heel and stared back at the square. At the graceless tower of the Baptist church posturing against the racing clouds. At the writhing monkey-puzzle trees, pride of the ornamental gardens. At the empty bandstand. At the bus shelter. At the dark patches of the side streets. At the doorways one by one.
“Why Mr. Canterbury, it’s you,” an old lady’s voice objected sharply as the door opened behind him. “You bad man. You caught the night sleeper again, I can tell. Why ever didn’t you telephone?”
“Hullo, Miss Dubber,” said Pym. “How are you?”
“Never mind how I am, Mr. Canterbury. Come in at once. You’ll catch your death.”
But the ugly windswept square seemed to have locked Pym in its spell. “I thought Sea View was up for sale, Miss D,” he remarked as she tried to pluck him into the house. “You told me Mr. Cook moved out when his wife died. Wouldn’t set foot in the place, you said.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. He was allergic. Come in this instant, Mr. Canterbury, and wipe your feet before I make your tea.”
“So what’s a light doing in his upstairs bedroom window?” Pym asked as he allowed her to tug him up the steps.
Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.
“Mr. Cook has rented out the upper flat, Celia Venn has taken it to paint in. That’s you all over.” She slid a bolt. “Disappear for three months, come back in the middle of the night and worry about a light in someone’s window.” She slid another. “You’ll never change, Mr. Canterbury. I don’t know why I bother.”
“Who on earth is Celia Venn?”
“Dr. Venn’s daughter, silly. She wants to see the sea and paint it.” Her voice changed abruptly. “Why Mr. Canterbury, how dare you? Take that off this instant.”
With the last bolt in place Miss Dubber had straightened up as best she could and was preparing herself for a reluctant hug. But instead of her customary scowl, which nobody believed in for a moment, her poky little face had twisted in fright.
“Your horrid black tie, Mr. Canterbury. I won’t have death in the house, I won’t have you bring it. Who is it for?”
Pym was a handsome man, boyish but distinguished. In his early fifties he was in his prime, full of zeal and urgency in a place that knew none. But the best thing about him in Miss Dubber’s view was his lovely smile that gave out so much warmth and truth and made her feel right.
“Just an old Whitehall colleague, Miss D. No one to flap about. No one close.”
“Everyone’s close at my age, Mr. Canterbury. What was his name?”
“I hardly knew the fellow,” said Pym emphatically, untying his tie and slipping it into his pocket. “And I’m certainly not going to tell you his name and have you hunting the obituaries, so there.” His eye as he said this fell on the visitors’ book, which lay open on the hall table beneath the orange nightlight that he had fitted to her ceiling on his last visit. “Any casuals at all, Miss D?” he asked as he scanned the list. “Runaway couples, mystery princesses? What happened to those two lover-boys who came at Easter?”
“They were not lover-boys,” Miss Dubber corrected him severely as she hobbled towards the kitchen. “They took single rooms and in the evenings they watched football on the television. What was that you said, Mr. Canterbury?”
But Pym had not spoken. Sometimes his gushes of communication were like phone calls cut off by some inner censorship before they could be completed. He turned back a page and then another.
“I don’t think I’ll do casuals any more,” Miss Dubber said through the open kitchen doorway as she lit the gas. “Sometimes when the doorbell goes I sit here with Toby and I say: ‘You answer it, Toby.’ He doesn’t of course. A tortoiseshell cat can’t answer a door. So we go on sitting here. We sit and we wait and we hear the footsteps go away again.” She cast a sly glance at him. “You don’t think our Mr. Canterbury is smitten, do you, Toby?” she enquired archly of her cat. “We’re very bright this morning. Very shiny. Ten years younger, by the look of our coat, Mr. Canterbury is.” Receiving no helpful response from the cat, she addressed herself to the canary. “Not that he’d ever tell us, would he, Dickie? We’d be the last to know. Tzuktzuk? Tzuktzuk?”