Saturday evening
“Thirteen at dinner,” sniffed Mrs. Bennet. “I thought we were twelve, six men and six girls. I don’t know how I miscalculated.”
Oliver knew. The forgotten guest was clearly Effie, since the other six females were all called Bennet, the middle-aged Wendy considering herself as much a “girl” as her five daughters. He glanced behind him, but Effie was still standing by the front door out of earshot, taking in the capacious entrance hall of the Bennets’ eighteenth century mansion.
Mrs. Bennet leaned closer. She was almost as tall as he was, with black bobbed hair and abrupt features and wearing a yellow silk sheath that you’d have said was too small for her (although you’d have thought that she was too big for it). “I’m not usually superstitious, Oliver, but we don’t want to risk any bad luck tonight, because of Lucinda’s engagement.”
“Lucinda’s getting married?” Oliver was genuinely delighted, because it would reduce the number of Bennet sisters who considered him a potential husband by twenty percent. This was not a flattering distinction; the number of males who fit this target category was, by now, approaching half the population of Europe, including gay men if necessary; but it still required him on these rare occasions to suffer two or three hours of unwelcome flirtation across the dinner table. Or it would have, had Effie not been there. He hoped.
The trip from Synne to Pigsneye was short, even though no English road planner had followed flying crows since the Roman occupation. Effie drove them in her Renault, because Ben’s Lamborghini was a two-seater. She seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the approaching dinner.
“What are you working on when you’re not shooting semi-naked models?” she had asked Ben, accelerating around a blind corner on the country lane.
“Wallpaper.”
“You design wallpaper?”
“I photograph it. Some of my wealthier clients have the most beautiful wallpaper in their homes—William Morris, Alphonse Mucha, much of it original. I want them to see that it can be more striking than the paintings or prints they hang over it. So I take a large-format photograph of the wallpaper and they display it in a frame in front of the real wallpaper.”
“But what’s to stop them just hanging up an empty frame instead of hiring you?” asked Oliver from the backseat.
Ben sighed. “Because, my dear Ollie, that’s not ironic. That’s just lazy.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About £10,000 a session.”
Following Oliver’s directions, Effie had pulled into a gap in a dense arborvitae hedge. A gravel driveway led eventually to a substantial Georgian mansion where she stopped the car under a porte-cochere. “I smell money,” she had muttered. Stepping across the threshold of Bennet Hall, she seemed to shrink slightly and become distracted by the appearance of her shoes. Mr. Bennet, a small man, balding and bespectacled, who always looked as if you were about to speak to him, helped her remove her thin raincoat, exuding nervous hospitality. Oliver had noticed before that Effie, self-assured and fearless when on official police business, was uncomfortable in social settings that contrasted with her own upbringing. At least, he’d always assumed she had a working-class background, although she rarely spoke of her childhood. He’d never met her family.
“So who’s Luce’s lucky man?” Oliver asked Mrs. Bennet.
“The Honorable Donald Quilt-Hogg, fifth son of the Earl of Yateley. The Honorable Donald is with us tonight. It’s an excellent match—not too many potential spouses out there who have all the requirements: just nineteen, a guaranteed virgin, as pure as snow, knows one end of a horse from another, and would look good in a Countess’s robes just in case of a regrettable quartet of family tragedies.”
“Well, as long as Luce doesn’t mind about the cross-dressing.”
Mrs. Bennet gave what she thought was a girlish giggle.
“I’m describing Lucinda, you rogue, as you well know. It’s my heart’s desire to see one of my girls marry into the aristocracy.”
Oliver thought, “It’s your heart’s desire to see one of your girls marry full stop.” Although the oldest Bennet sister was only twenty-five, that was thirty-nine in debutante years. Lucinda, fresh out of the starting gate at nineteen—he’d assumed Wendy had measured her daughter in years, not hands—was bucking a trend. Still, from what he’d heard about the current finances of the current Lord Yateley (and currency didn’t feature much), there was a clear tit for tat in the pairing, no doubt starting with Lucinda’s well-heeled father helping to get the Yateley family jewels out of hock in time for the wedding. Never mind the nouveau, feel the riche.
“And when did the Hon. Don pop the question?” Oliver asked.
Mrs. Bennet lowered her voice still further. “Well, dear, he’s not exactly asked her in so many words, which is why we don’t want to take any chances with Lady Luck. Lafcadio and I will leave the dining room to you eleven youngsters. I’d join you, but Lafcadio sulks if he’s made to dine alone, the brute, and we girls may not see the checkbook for a month.”
We girls. Wendy Bennet didn’t like to be reminded that there was any generation younger than her own. “My oldest daughter’s in her twenties,” she would frequently confess with an expression that anticipated your shocked disbelief, and then would look away coyly so she never had to notice that it wasn’t forthcoming.
Mr. Bennet was now ushering Effie into the presence of his wife, who managed to force her lower face into a dazzling smile while her eyes skewered the surplus female guest with a malevolent glare. Effie, who had faced down criminal court judges, murderers, and other evildoers, quailed slightly. The senior Bennets withdrew to bully the hired kitchen staff, and the new arrivals were shown into the drawing room.
Once Effie’s pupils had adjusted to the blaze of gilded furniture, ormolu clocks, and gold-edged porcelain, she became aware that the settees supported a full hand of Bennet daughters, all staring at her with a mix of curiosity and appraisal. It was unlikely that anyone had ever dared bring the girls’ shared plainness to their notice, but that hadn’t stopped them devoting much of their time—it would be redundant to call it their “free” time—and much of their father’s fortune to grooming and styling. For a quiet dinner at home, the sisters were decked out in bright bracelets, necklaces, and earrings that almost, but not quite, eclipsed the satin and chiffon of their designer gowns. Effie, cool and stunning in the newer of the two dresses she’d brought with her—a blue cotton Monsoon sundress that Oliver had assured her would be adequate for the occasion—felt self-conscious and underdressed.
As Oliver made the introductions, she used her police training to fix which sister was which, noting the color of their dresses and their expensive hairstyles. (Her own mutinous curls had been dragged into a tentative ponytail.) The girls’ listless conversation gave her less to work with, with the possible exceptions of Davina, the oldest and least unattractive (dark bob like her mother’s, black Valentino), who seemed to have some spark of personality. Unfortunately, not a very pleasant one. Lucinda, the youngest (medium brown hair, long and upswept, caramel Dior) never spoke at all, but gazed with a half-smile at the Honorable Donald Quilt-Hogg. The other sisters gazed frankly at Ben. As Oliver had once commented, Ben didn’t so much ooze charm as squirt it.
The same could not be said of the Honorable Donald (Norton & Sons, tweed). He was a tall, well-built young man, with prematurely thinning blondish hair, whose speech was similarly sparse, apart from a sporadic comment that sounded to Effie like “Ah, jolly old honkers!” followed by a throaty chuckle.
Oliver, sensing Effie’s discomfort, poured two glasses of white Sauterne from a gold-rimmed cooler on the sideboard and passed one to her without asking. She finished it in two gulps. After an agonizing twenty minutes of desultory small talk about the London Season, the door opened and Toby came in, followed by another young man.
“Sorry I’m late,” Toby said. “Eric and I got caught in the theatre traffic.”
“Still, better it’s us that’s ‘late’ than any of you girls, eh?” said his companion, with a general leer for the room. “Know what I mean?” he added unnecessarily, but the sisters’ laughter was apparently genuine. Lucinda whispered an explanation into Quilt-Hogg’s ear, and he nodded, muttering his favorite phrase again.
“Oh, Eric,” cried Davina, taking the newcomer by the arm, “for Jesu’s sake, forbeare. Come and meet the new arrivals.”
“At your cervix, dear madam,” the young man declared. He was introduced to Quilt-Hogg, Ben, and finally to Effie, to whom he bowed with comic gallantry.
“Nice one, Olls,” Eric said, nudging Oliver and indicating Effie with a sideways nod of his head. “Like the hair.”
Oliver smiled politely, wishing he had Wendy Bennet’s talent for signaling utter contempt at the same time. Eric Mormal (Tesco, black cotton) was an old school friend of Toby’s, a lean, pale specter, who looked like a stretched thirteen-year-old, complete with residual acne, a pubic moustache, and a mind permanently in the gutter—not so much for the filth to be found there, but because it was the best place to metaphorically look up women’s skirts. He worked for a nearby cooperative farm, but his bliss was to become a full-time rock legend as evidenced by spiky dyed-blond hair, tattoos, and a collection of hoops in his ear that made it look like a shower curtain.
“So who are you fronting now?” Oliver asked, trying to remember what Toby had last told him about Mormal’s musical career. “Is it still The Gong Farmers?”
“Nah, we have a new lineup now: we’re called ‘Mrs. Slocombe’s Pussy.’” He tried to toss a stuffed olive into his mouth, without success. It rolled under a sofa.
What was Mormal doing here? Oliver wondered. For girls of the Bennets’ micro-class—Orwell would have stuck them in the lower-upper-middle bracket—the provincial dinner party was still the primary lek, the gentrified equivalent of the singles bar. No doubt it was at some similar, very soft society event that the Honorable Donald had been strutting his well-tailored but fraying plumage when Lucinda, scenting an aristo, had wafted a few choice pheromones in his direction; thus the Hon. Don was undone. But Eric Mormal was the barrel’s scrapings, the living reason why “uncouth” has no antonym. Surely Wendy wasn’t this desperate?
Ben had been invited to squeeze onto an unyielding settee between the Bennets’ only twins, Clarissa and Catriona (both loose blonde curls, yellow Lanvin and blue LaCroix, respectively) and was asking them politely where he might have seen them before when a young woman in an ill-fitting housemaid’s uniform belted a gong beside the fireplace, a fearful summons to the dining room. He got up gratefully from his Bennet sandwich, and the two girls followed silently in his wake.
The customary separation of couples at the dining table didn’t seem to apply to Lucinda and the Honorable Donald, presumably so that if the urge to propose came over him during the meal, he could skip the legwork and drop to one knee straight from his chair. Effie, however, was squashed between Quilt-Hogg on her right and Mormal on her left, while Oliver was consigned to the other side of the table. He had squeezed her elbow reassuringly as they entered the dining room. “Just signal if I start to drink the finger-bowl,” she had whispered, nervously scanning the ranks of silverware that bordered her tablemat.
“Did you meet Oliver up at Oxford, Effie?” Xanthe Bennet (blond chin-length hair, gray Chanel) ventured from across the table, after they had taken their seats.
“No, but I met him in Oxford, once,” said Effie with a smile, and immediately watched her witticism sail effortlessly over Xanthe’s head. She’d noticed that, among the bling, each girl was wearing a diamond-encrusted pin with the initial of her first name. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Xanthe thought it her entire signature.
“So where did you go to college?” Davina now demanded, clearly the chief hostess in her mother’s absence.
“Just Hendon.”
“Is there a University of Hendon? We don’t know it.”
“It’s the police training establishment, the Peel Centre,” Effie explained, as a dish of strangely soapy consommé arrived in front of her. Spoon, she thought.
“So what are you?” asked Xanthe, “a Scotland Yard superintendent, like Oliver’s uncle?”
“Just a sergeant for now.”
“Hey, Olls,” called Mormal, between noisy inhalations of the soup, “do you make Effie keep her uniform on? It’s the black stockings, innit?”
“Effie’s my uncle’s principal assistant,” Oliver explained, hoping his pride in his girlfriend would cheer her a little. He knew that her role as a guest would keep the Strongitharm Look in check, much as he longed to see Mormal zapped by it. “That means she’s a plain-clothes officer.”
“How appropriate,” murmured Davina with a private smile. Effie eviscerated a dinner roll.
“Well, Effie,” said Mormal, patting her on the shoulder, “you can feel my collar any time. And not just my collar, if you know what I mean,” he added, winking at Oliver across the table.
“Tragically, I do,” Effie muttered, but Mormal wasn’t listening. He had jumped to his feet, holding his soup spoon as if it were a microphone.
“And now a little recitation entitled ‘She was only the policeman’s daughter, but she let the chief inspector…’”
Once again, all the sisters dissolved into indulgent laughter.
“Oh, Eric,” chortled Catriona, “you’re so leisure.”
Mormal subsided into his chair at an angle that would let him glimpse down Effie’s neckline each time she took a sip of consommé, which, like Mormal, was thick and unwholesome.
“Oliver, what’s this we hear about you stumbling over bodies again?” Xanthe demanded. “We’ve been literally dying to ask you.”
“My uncle and I found Dennis Breedlove’s body last night,” Oliver confirmed. He wanted to learn more about the old man’s life, in the hope that it would provide a path to the blackmailer, but this gossipy crowd was surely not the forum.
“Yeah, the word is he hanged himself from the old Synne Oak,” Mormal said.
“That’s what it looks like.”
Mormal smiled. “Got any gory details?”
Davina glared at him fiercely across the table. “Eric, I don’t think this is an appropriate subject for a supper party,” she said. Her younger sisters let loose little sighs of disappointment.
“I agree,” said Toby, who had clearly been told of the death since he had fled the Swithins’ home that afternoon. “It’s very sad. I liked Mr. Breedlove a lot. I used to visit him. He was always up for a chat about my research.”
He seemed to tear up. Oliver noticed Mormal and Davina catch each other’s eye again, this time with a faint hint of amusement. He guessed it was some private mockery of Toby’s sentiments, a shared cynicism momentarily spanning the class chasm between them, scorning what they saw as unmanly grief, and he despised them for it.
“He seemed such a cheerful little chap,” said Catriona. “One felt one could tell him anything. Do you know what drove him to end his life, Oliver?”
Oliver looked at Effie for guidance. She shrugged.
“The police think it was because he’d received a blackmail letter,” he said.
“He was being blackmailed?” Mormal exclaimed. “What on earth for?”
“I can’t imagine.” Not here, anyway, Oliver added silently. Davina’s eyes stayed on Oliver, across the table.
“Perhaps he couldn’t afford to pay,” suggested Ben. “And so he knew he would inevitably be exposed.”
“Exposed,” repeated Mormal, as if he were genetically required to report every potential double entendre.
“Exposed,” echoed Quilt-Hogg. He pointed at Ben. “It’s funny, because he’s a photographer,” he explained to Lucinda.
“Please,” said Davina firmly, “I insist that we change the subject.” She sat back as a stuffed artichoke was deposited in her place by the stoic housemaid.
“Oh, Davvy, this is literally the most hair-raising thing that’s happened for yonks,” Xanthe protested. “All right, we’ll respect the late Mr. Breedlove. But let’s play a guessing game. What’s the one thing that would make each of us commit suicide?”
“I know what would do it for Davina,” giggled Catriona. “Being caught with a single hair out of place.” She turned to her eldest sister. “Honestly, Davvy, you’re so vain. I think if you ever got a run in your tights, you’d shrivel up with humiliation.”
“Literally,” added Xanthe.
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” said Davina.
“Exaggeration? You even secretly ironed your underwear this afternoon!” said Catriona.
“Why did she do that?” asked Clarissa.
“I think it was because Oliver was coming to dinner,” claimed Catriona, with a sly glance at Effie, who felt freshly conscious that her dress had traveled to Synne rolled up in a duffel bag. Oliver, momentarily relieved that the ghastly conversation had drifted from Uncle Dennis toward sisterly teasing, felt the dread return.
“That’s astounding,” said Clarissa.
“That she was ironing her underwear?”
“No, that Davvy knows how to use an iron.”
“She clearly doesn’t, because she burned herself. That’s how I found out.”
Davina glanced ruefully at the pink stripe on the edge of her hand, but Oliver noticed that the move was calculated to show off her golden wristwatch. A Cartier Tank Americaine. Money.
“You’re afraid of being baffled, Davina,” said Toby genially. “In the Shakespearean sense, that is. In his time, ‘baffled’ meant publicly embarrassed.”
“Really?” replied Davina. “Then I’d have something in common with dear Effie. I hear the police are often baffled.”
Effie glared down at her artichoke and took another mouthful of wine.
“Toby, why don’t you tell the ladies about the dig you’re working on in Stratford,” Oliver cut in swiftly.
“Oh, is that part of your research?” Ben asked.
Toby looked at Mormal. “No, it’s just an excuse to spend a few weeks in Shakespeare Central, soaking up the atmosphere. There’s a small island next to the downstream weir on the Avon. An old Victorian house on it is being demolished. It’s standard practice to sift through the dirt whenever there’s any rebuilding in the Stratford area, just in case. So a bunch of us from my college agreed to do it, and Eric volunteered to help us in his spare time. But we don’t expect to find anything from Shakespeare’s time—we’re well south of the seventeenth-century part of town and on the opposite side of the river.”
“Then what is this research of yours, Toby?” asked Davina. “Educate us.”
“It’s about the true identity of William Shakespeare. You probably know that many people think Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. That the author was really Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or even Christopher Marlowe, whose murder in 1593 must have been faked. What’s provoked these theories is our incredulity that the son of a provincial glover—or butcher, according to some sources—with no university education could write dramas that require an intimate knowledge of court intrigue, the law, foreign explorations, Roman history, and so on.”
“So you’ve found yet another candidate?” asked Ben. “Queen Elizabeth the First with no wig and a false moustache? Or is it really that infinite number of monkeys?”
Toby laughed. “No, I believe that the plays were written by William Shakespeare, all right. But this is the odd part. When you look at the very few surviving facts about Shakespeare, the London actor-playwright, and Shakespeare, the Stratford-upon-Avon landowner and businessman, there’s no overlap.”
“Perhaps he was Ernest in the town and Jack in the country,” Oliver said, unable to decide which way his artichoke more resembled a pinecone, in appearance or in taste.
“Ernest and Jack Worthing turned out to be same person. My belief is that Stratford Will and London Will were two different people.”
“Because of this lack of evidence?” asked Effie.
“The scanty documentation isn’t so unusual in itself. We don’t know much about the personal lives of any dramatists of that period. So most research is like Kim’s Game. We have to ask what’s missing that we’d truly expect to see: the ‘pregnant negative.’ And what we don’t have is a single piece of paper written or signed by Stratford Will that lays claim to his being the great London poet and playwright. For example, Stratford Will’s notorious last will and testament—the one that leaves his wife the ‘second-best bed’—doesn’t mention his part ownership in any South Bank theaters. In fact, it doesn’t mention any manuscripts or books or unfinished plays or other papers. No, I think London Will is a different William Shakespeare, from somewhere other than Stratford.”
The housemaid slipped into the room and began to replace the remains of the artichoke with plates of gray roast beef.
“But just a tick,” Catriona protested. “What about Stratford Will’s tomb? We were taken there on a school trip once. There’s that statue on the church wall that looks just like all those photographs of London Will.”
“Aha, that’s where history got sidetracked, Cat,” Toby remarked, helping himself to overcooked vegetables. “I think that sometime after Stratford Will died in 1616, somebody spotted that he had the same name as a famous London playwright, who may well have died three or four years earlier, going by the dates of his last plays. And thus, with a little jiggery-pokery, the Stratford Shakespeare industry was born, hijacking London Will’s fame. Ka-ching!”
“And so we never found the real London Will…” Oliver ventured.
“…because we never knew we had to look for him.”
“How deep you are!” said Catriona, leaning across the table and gazing intently into Toby’s dark, nervous eyes, which took on an expression of mild panic. Clarissa, beside him, who had tuned out of the conversation five minutes earlier and was wondering instead why Catriona was wearing her own initial pin, took her cue to drop her hand onto Toby’s forearm.
“Well, Toby,” Davina intervened with a yawn, “it all sounds very brainy, but I’m sure I speak for Effie when I say let’s move on to a less taxing subject.”
“Then I suppose it’s my turn to tell you what I’m working on,” Oliver said quickly, observing Effie for signs of an impending Look. He thought about announcing his next planned story in the Railway Mice series, The Railway Mice and the Frog of the Baskervilles, but then it occurred to him to try out his idea for the book of common knowledge (which wasn’t a bad title, come to think of it). It took several goes to make the Bennets understand he was not talking about regular trivia, known only to cognoscenti, such as that the banana plant is technically a herb, not a tree; nor indeed about obvious information concerning the banana’s color, its taste, or (as Mormal persisted in mentioning) its suggestive shape—every fool can tell that. But the banana’s reputation as a source of potassium is perfect paradigm of…what should he call it?
“Let me think of another example,” he said. He fixed his eyes on Mormal and inspiration came. “What’s the first odd fact that comes to mind when I say the word ‘cockroach’?”
“Cockroaches will be the only survivors of a nuclear war,” said Toby instantly. Oliver nodded.
“Most people have heard that, although there doesn’t seem to be an atom of truth in it. But, as I’m finding, fact is nowhere near as appealing, or as memorable, as some fictions.”
“Effie, you’re very quiet,” interrupted Davina. “I suppose you’re used to that, with such an intelligent boyfriend. Let’s tempt you into the conversation. Were you at Royal Ascot this year?”
“Not this year, no,” Effie replied sweetly, as she stabbed a soggy Brussels sprout. “And before you ask, you patronizing bitch, not at Henley, or Cowes Week, or the Chelsea frigging Flower Show or any other stopping-off place in the London Season where you inbred oxygen-thieves get a last chance to squander your ill-gotten wealth before the revolution comes and you’re all dangling from the lampposts,” she added mentally.
“I say,” Quilt-Hogg cut in. “Nuclear war—atom of truth. That’s jolly good.” He chuckled. Lucinda squeezed his hand reassuringly.
The table started to split into smaller conversational clusters, and Effie discovered that if she looked busy with her food, smiled occasionally at nothing in particular, and kept her eyes fixed on the cruet, she could exclude herself from any subgroup that included a Bennet. Apart from a brief exchange with Eric Mormal, who asked her if the “eff” in “Effie” was short for what he thought it was—it wasn’t—she managed to get all the way to dessert in splendid isolation. Only Oliver, out of reach, noticed.
“Do you ski?” Quilt-Hogg asked suddenly. Effie turned and realized the question was for her.
“No, I’ve yet to learn,” she said, remembering the Easter school vacations when her more affluent friends jetted off for a week on the bunny slopes of St. Moritz.
“Ah. Sail?” Quilt-Hogg persisted, following some mental checklist for dinner conversations.
“No.”
“Shoot?”
“No, I don’t like guns.” What was next, bungee polo?
“Shame,” he went on, clearly permitted to talk about himself after three refusals. “Got a couple of Purdeys, myself.”
“I always say there’s nothing like a nice pair of Purdeys, eh, Effie?” Mormal cut in. Xanthe and Lucinda giggled. The table was clearly regathering.
“He’s so leisure,” said Xanthe happily, to nobody in particular.
“Rather,” Quilt-Hogg agreed. “One’s a bit of an antique. My people gave me the other for my twenty-first birthday. Side-by-side self-opening sidelock. Cost a packet, hundred thou, cleaned out the old man’s bank account, but worth the dosh. So you don’t use a gun in your job, eh?”
“I’ve trained in marksmanship.”
“Ah. What do you police types use these days?”
“A Glock 17. I’ve also handled a Smith and Wesson revolver. A .38 model ten.”
“Most excellent! Fancy, a couple of rounds from one of those should put the wind up Johnny Foreigner, when he gets above himself.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Effie said tactfully. When the hell can we go home? she thought. Oh dear God, this wasn’t going to be one of those gatherings where the ladies withdraw from the table and leave the men to their cigars and brandy, was it?
“Get the shooters, George!” said Quilt-Hogg suddenly.
“What?”
“That’s what they used to say in those old police shows. Most amusing.” He adopted what he thought was a Cockney accent. “‘Get the shooters, George!’”
“Oh, Donald, you’re so frightfully clever,” breathed Lucinda. Effie reached for her wineglass.
“Shut it!” cried Mormal, from Effie’s left, drawing out the vowels. “They said that too. It’s how cops talk. ‘Shut it!’”
“Get the shooters, George!”
“Shut it!”
Effie had to speak or she would be forced to grab the two men by their various supplies of hair and slam their heads together into the plate of trifle that had just arrived.
“You all remember what happened to Reg Thigpen, don’t you?” she asked.
“Reg Thigpen?” echoed Davina, with some distaste, as if the coarse syllables were coated in brown sauce.
“Undercroft Colliery?” Effie prompted. “Derbyshire? Front page news for a week, about two years ago?” All the women and two of the men at the table were looking at her blankly. She pressed on.
“To remind you then, the government wanted to close the pit, but the miners went on strike to keep it open. Most of the public took the side of the miners, and the more the government dug in, the more popular sentiment began to swing against them. With a general election due, this wasn’t good. And then along came Reg Thigpen.”
Was this a suitable topic for a Bennet beanfeast? She didn’t care anymore.
“Thigpen was a petty criminal from London, just out of jail for the umpteenth time. Years earlier, Oliver’s Uncle Tim had arrested him for burglary. Thigpen was an easy recruit for the dodgy bus company that was driving scab workers into and out of the colliery. Every day, the television news showed poor Reg driving slowly through a screaming throng of pickets, while trash and stones were hurled at the bus. The viewing public hated him. Until one day, in the middle of the second week of the strike, bang!”
Some of her audience started.
“The windscreen shatters, and Reg is abruptly the late Reg, a single gunshot right between the eyes.”
She paused. The table was hushed.
“We never found the gunman. But the point is that the incident changed public opinion overnight. Reg Thigpen went from being a despised strikebreaker to a tragic victim of out-of-control union thuggery. The strike petered out, the colliery closed, the miners lost their jobs, and the government won the next election on a law-and-order platform. All because of one shot from one gun.”
She turned to Quilt-Hogg and smiled. “The British public don’t have much taste for guns, Donald. They don’t like it when their police officers get the shooters. Not in real life.”
Effie took a forkful of trifle, while her audience absorbed the story. Xanthe opened her mouth as if she was going to ask a question, but shut it again.
And then she remembered the tactic that could be used whenever she felt puzzled by something beyond her understanding, when her ignorance might be publicly exposed—that tactic employed by all young English women whose careful breeding and dauntless narcissism are in inverse proportion to their intelligence.
She laughed prettily.
It was a sweet, tinkling laugh, as infectious as a yawn. Her sisters too began to snigger, as if Effie’s story had been a joke, a tale to hoodwink and delight them, nothing more than a passing pleasantry. They turned their amusement on their male companions, a strategy that generally charmed their feckless admirers and won them to the ladies’ side, isolating the earnest storyteller; although in this case, only two of the men did more than return a strained smile in the face of their hostesses’ spiteful merriment.
As new conversations burst around her like fireworks, Effie looked hard at Ben, directly across the table.
“How much have you had to drink?” she asked.
“Just a couple of glasses of wine.”
“Good. Because you’re driving us home tonight.” She drained her glass and reached for a nearby bottle of Riesling.