‘Yes, yes,’ said Trubshawe impatiently, ‘but could we get back to Gentry, please?’
‘Oh well, there’s not much more to say. Precisely the same thing happened to us as happened to poor Clem. Having somehow got wind of our mutual past, Cora’s and mine, Gentry started to taunt us both across the dinner-table. And all in so sly and subtle a fashion that, as Cora has told you, only she and I could have known what he was talking about.’
‘How did the subject come up?’
‘Really, it was so puerile I can barely remember.’
‘“Lady of Spain”, Evie?’ the actress prompted her. ‘You might mention that.’
‘“Lady of Spain”?’ repeated a bemused Trubshawe.
The novelist winced at the memory.
‘Yes, it was that silly. Selina happened to be seated at the piano and she asked if any of us had a request. When Cynthia suggested “Lady of Spain” – you know, “Lady of Spain, I adore you, tra la la la, I implore you!” – Gentry instantly treated Cora and me to one of his sniggery stares and proposed that, for our benefit, the song be titled not “Lady of Spain” but “Ladies of Lisbon”.’
Now Trubshawe looked downright baffled.
‘Ladies of Lisbon? I don’t understand. Lisbon’s in Portugal, not Spain.’
Once again both actress and novelist burst into gales of uncontrollable laughter. Once again a glimpse, so fleeting as to be almost imperceptible, was afforded of two fun-loving young women who, eons before, had shared a small cold flat and a big warm bed in Bloomsbury. Then, as rapidly as they had emerged, the ghosts of their younger, gayer selves beat a discreet retreat into the past where they belonged, just as a matching pair of blushes lit up Trubshawe’s cheeks. It had taken a few seconds, but he had, finally, got it.
‘I see – yes, yes, I do see,’ he mumbled, audibly mortified.
‘Your word, mind?’ said Cora Rutherford. ‘You gave us your word?’
‘Oh yes. I gave you my word and I assure you I’ll keep it. Queer, that is, giving something you end up also keeping, but you know what I mean. You can trust me, ladies.
‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘I have, of course, that one direct question of mine to put to you both. Miss Rutherford, Miss Mount, did either of you murder Raymond Gentry?’
‘You first,’ said Cora Rutherford to Evadne Mount.
‘No, no, I insist, you first,’ said Evadne Mount to Cora Rutherford.
‘Age before beauty,’ said Cora Rutherford.
‘My sentiments entirely,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Which is why you’ve obviously got to go first.’
‘Curses! Why must you always have the last word, you hideous old bag?’ said Cora Rutherford with a boxy shrug of her padded shoulders.
She faced up to the Chief-Inspector.
‘No, I did not murder Raymond Gentry. Though, to be candid with you, Trubshawe, I wish I had. It’s profoundly satisfying to me, as it is to everybody else in this room, I’m sure, that the monster is no more. But it would have been even more satisfying to know that it was I who had had the pluck – the pluck or the luck – to put him out of his misery. I mean, of course, out of our misery.’
‘Snap!’ cried Evadne Mount.
Chapter Seven
The Rolfes, whose turn it was next, had in reality two stories to tell, not one, and it was the Doctor who narrated the first and his wife the second. Since, in their case, the Chief-Inspector’s interpolations were relatively few and far between and, until the very end of Madge Rolfe’s account, were mostly routine and pedestrian, and since neither husband nor wife saw fit to question the other on a matter of interpretation, or interrupt on a matter of fact, it will make better sense to edit out all extraneous comments.
Well now (said the Doctor, caressing his moustache, so neat and pencil-thin it scarcely seemed to belong to the same species as Trubshawe’s hirsute excrescence), Madge and I settled down here, as many of you are aware, some seven years ago. Most conveniently for us, old Dr Butterworth in Postbridge was on the point of retiring. He’d put his practice up for sale, I bought it off him, and I also bought the charmingly dilapidated cottage which went with it and in which we’ve been living ever since.
In Postbridge, of course, I’m nothing but a common-or-garden GP. Most of my work seems to involve colic, corns and chilblains. I never see a serious case, I mean an interesting study, from one twelvemonth to the next. I am what you might describe as a human placebo. And I’ve long suspected that my bedside manner, which those of you who think me something of a cold fish may be surprised to learn I can turn on and off at will like a bathroom tap, has a markedly more remedial effect on my patients than anything I ever prescribe for them.
It wasn’t always thus. I trained as a paediatric surgeon and, even though I say so myself, it was becoming pretty clear that I was destined, if not perhaps for greatness, then let’s say for real eminence. I published several admired papers in the Lancet on the pathology of parturition – that’s childbearing to you – and at St Theodore’s was considered very much the coming man.
In those halcyon days Madge and I were, I suppose, as content as we’ve ever been or are ever likely to be again. We had a circle of attractive, clever acquaintances, even a cluster of famous or semi-famous ones, and we lived in a minute mews house in Notting Hill. Hardly a fashionable area, I grant you, but for those of us who couldn’t afford Kensington it was a nice enough place in which to live, to entertain our friends and, above all, to envisage bringing up a family.
Bringing up a family. Ah now, there was the terrible, tragic irony of our lives. It may be hard for you to credit this, you who’ve only come to know her in recent years, but all Madge ever wanted was to have lots of children. Even among my own patients, I’ve known few women with such a strong maternal instinct. And it was that maternal instinct of hers that made our plight so horribly ironic. For, you see, we – I should say, I – I couldn’t have children. Even though I was raised alongside half-a-dozen brothers and sisters, I myself am … well, I’m sterile.
So now you know. On us, too, life played, to borrow Evadne’s phrase, a sneaky, underhand trick. There I was, a distinguished paediatric surgeon, aiding and abetting healthy young wives every day of my professional life to bring bonnie babes into the world, and I was incapable of giving my own wife the sprogs she so desperately desired.
Our marriage was undone by that failure of mine. It was haunted by the children we never had. It was almost as though we had had them and they’d died – as though, don’t you see, they’d died on us even before they’d had a chance to be born. They lived with us, those unborn children of ours, they lived with us like little ghosts, like little baby ghosts, in our nice little house in Notting Hill.
My apologies. I haven’t let many people see me like this. Not even Madge, when I think of it. I tend to reserve my bedside manner exclusively for my patients.
Anyway – to continue. Naturally, we discussed the possibility of adoption. I have to say, though, we were seriously discouraged by the experience of some neighbours of ours. They were childless too, and they adopted a little orphaned boy, hardly more than an infant, whose parents had both been decapitated in a motor-car accident. But what they weren’t told – not, at least, until the problem had got out of hand – was that the tot’s father had been an illiterate navvy and his mother a gin-swigging, half-gypsy slattern. In short, they were as common as dirt and, as was inevitable, that bad blood had been inherited by their wretched offspring.