Saturday afternoon (continued)
Oliver followed Sidney Weguelin into a small sitting room, with curtains drawn and the lights on. Another person was sitting on a couch, watching television. It wasn’t Lesbia; it seemed to be a man. In fact, it was Sidney. Another Sidney, albeit a Sidney with, mercifully, no moustache or goatee or glasses, but with a large surgical dressing taped across a swollen and discolored nose.
“He found out,” said the first Sidney.
“You idiot, he’s bluffing,” snarled the other Sidney.
“No,” replied Sidney One, turning off the television and looking at Oliver. “He knows.”
Sidney Two didn’t answer, but glared at Oliver. There was an awkward silence.
“Is it broken?” Oliver asked.
“It bloody hurts, that’s all I know.”
“Sorry. Have you seen a doctor?”
“How could I go to a doctor? If I’d stepped outside looking like this, you’d have been waiting with your binoculars and your notebook and Christ knows what else. Then you’d know it was me who’d attacked you.”
“I said I was sorry.” Oliver leaned in and showed the side of his head. “Look, you bruised my ear. It’s still ringing a little.”
“Good. I was only trying to warn you off, you know.” Sidney Two sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway, since you seem to have rumbled our little secret. All that spying finally paid off, did it?”
“No. Until a few moments ago, I was still convinced there was only one of you, playing two roles.”
“Then how did you find out?” asked Sidney One, cautiously removing the goatee and moustache and placing them in a small pouch. The organist looked surprisingly younger.
“Oh, I was given a conundrum,” Oliver explained. “How can two people have different fingerprints but identical DNA? The answer: because they’re identical twins. We happen to have a set in the family.”
Sidney One let out a brief laugh. “But you were right, Oliver. Today, I am both Sidney and Lesbia. At least while my sibling is indisposed. I’ve just come from organ practice as Sidney, and according to the timetable, Lesbia is due to meet with the vicar in about half an hour to discuss the annual fete. So you’ll have to excuse me. My real name’s Robin, by the way.”
Oliver was left to the malignant glare of the other twin.
“So, blackmail,” said Sidney Two at last, with disgust.
“Blackmail,” Oliver confirmed. “I’d have left you alone otherwise.”
“You’re very professional. And very persistent.”
“Thank you. I will, of course, be the soul of discretion. Nobody in the village need ever know. You two can just carry on doing…whatever it is you do.”
The injured organist let out a snort of mirthless laughter. “That’s the way it works, is it? All right, how much do you want?”
“What?”
“How much money do you want?” repeated Sidney Two impatiently.
“I don’t want any money,” protested Oliver, puzzled by the reaction.
“What kind of a blackmailer doesn’t want money?”
“Blackmailer? I’m not a blackmailer.”
“Oh, you may choose to call it something less distasteful, but blackmail is what it comes down to. You’re here to arrange payments. Am I wrong?”
“No!” Oliver cried. “I mean, yes, you’re wrong. I’m not here to blackmail you. You’re already being blackmailed!”
“No, we’re not.”
“Well, not now, but you were. Do you deny that Dennis Breedlove was blackmailing you?”
“That old coot who hanged himself last week? He wasn’t blackmailing us.”
“Yes, he was.”
“No, he wasn’t. Nobody’s been blackmailing us except you!”
“But I’m not blackmailing you.”
“Not yet, you’re not.”
“But you’re Tweedledee and Tweedledum!” yelled Oliver, and stopped, breathless. “You must be,” he added softly, as Sidney Two stared at him with incomprehension. Of course, Oliver considered, the Weguelins may still deny being Breedlove’s victims, because they don’t want to be suspects in his murder. But from what he could see of the face staring back at him, around the bandages, the bafflement seemed genuine.
“Tweedle—?” Sidney began and then broke off to laugh. “This is all because you thought—?” the organist cackled between gasps for air. “But then we thought—” Again, convulsive laughter ended the sentence. And Oliver joined in.
“My name’s Kim,” said Sidney Two, stretching out a hand. “I shouldn’t laugh so much, it hurts my nose.”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry—”
“Oh, no hard feelings. Sorry about your ear. Do you want a drink?”
As they entered the kitchen, Lesbia spun around from a mirror propped on top of a counter—or rather, it was almost Lesbia, complete with cassock and thick cosmetics, but without the black-framed glasses and shiny wig. Kim reported what Oliver had revealed, and Robin joined them in the general merriment, punctuated by the opening of three bottles of beer. Free from their fears, the twins were friendly and good-humored, a marked contrast from their characters of Sidney and Lesbia, about whom Oliver was hearing.
“It’s performance art,” explained Kim. “We’re identical twins, Kim and Robin Essiss, playing a prissy married couple, Sidney and Lesbia Weguelin, the verger and organist in the Cotswold village of Synne. Life imitates art imitating life.”
“But there are two of you,” Oliver noted. “Why has nobody seen you together?”
“Plenty of people have seen us together,” said Robin, sliding the wig into place. “But we do minimize our joint appearances, in case someone spots any similarities. At parish meetings, we sit on opposite sides of the room.”
“So normally, you, Kim, are Sidney, and Robin is Lesbia?”
“Oh no,” said Kim. “We swap regularly. It’s an artistic statement about the malleability of human identity in modern life. Of course, we have to keep each other briefed, so that if I’m Lesbia one day, I’m not caught out by something Robin learned when playing Lesbia the day before.”
“Then when I first met Lesbia, coming out of the church…”
“That was me,” claimed Kim. “And that was me, too, as Sidney at Dennis Breedlove’s funeral.”
“But when I saw Lesbia next, in my parents’ kitchen, she reacted as if she had never met me before. Because that was you, Robin?”
Robin, now almost fully Lesbia, nodded. “Kim hadn’t fully informed me about Sidney and Lesbia’s earlier encounters, but I still should have improvised better. That’s what makes this performance so much fun.”
“You keep this up full-time, then?”
“Well, not once we’re home and behind closed doors,” Robin continued, swigging from the beer bottle and stuffing some folders into a large purse, which had been used to hold the mirror up. “Our impersonation of a married couple doesn’t go all the way to the bedroom.”
They both chortled at the idea, and Oliver was relieved. It would be hard to think of a term for a pair of incestuous gay transvestites, an unlikely threefer.
“How on earth did this all start?” he asked Kim, after Robin/Lesbia had scurried out of the front door.
“With our mother. She treated us identically, dressed us identically, made us go everywhere together. When we showed some musical talent, she couldn’t wait to parade us out onto the concert platform in identical costumes, playing four-handed pieces on the piano.”
“It’s not unusual for parents to dress twins that way, even if they’re nonidentical.”
“Yes, but Mother went further. She simply refused to accept that we were two different people, separate souls. And so as we got older, Robin and I would joke about how we could make ourselves look as different as possible. For a start, one of us would change sex. One of us would keep our slim build, while the other would pad up, and so on. And we’d always be ready to swap roles, which made it fun. Thus were Sidney and Lesbia born, two characters as unalike as we could make them. Originally, it was a routine we did to amuse our friends. Then, as an experiment, we tried to set up a household in Finchley. And then one day, we both decided we wanted a break from London and our jobs as professional musicians, and, well, here we are, living in Synne. Next year, we’re getting a film crew to make a documentary about the project.”
“I should have guessed that there was an element of fantasy about your lives,” Oliver said, with a smile. “After all, who’s called ‘Lesbia’ in real life?”
“Our mother,” Kim informed him. “Another beer?”