The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

Chapter One

It was at least twenty-five years since I had set eyes on Freddie Seston. But this didn’t prevent my giving a shout the moment I spotted him sitting a few tables away from me in Florian’s. Commonly when one meets a man after a really long interval one does have at least a fraction of a second’s uncertainty. One says to oneself that it must be old Butcher or Baker, but that one had better not be rash. On this occasion however I gave that shout instantly. Seston was unmistakable. In fact he had scarcely changed at all. Even in that hard Adriatic sunlight – for we were both sitting where the cafe tables spill far out on the piazza – – he quite failed to look middle-aged. And at my Freddie! he glanced up quickly from the coffee-cup into which he had been absently staring and his face broke into its old cheerfully mocking smile.

Jonathan! He jumped up – so abruptly that he knocked over a chair – and hurried across to me. How more than extraordinary!

It wasn’t of course that. People do run into each other after long intervals, and there are considerable numbers of Englishmen who are as likely to do so in Venice as anywhere else. But Freddie’s words were simply a random expression of delight. And I myself felt – what in maturity one doesn’t often feel, at least with one’s own sex – a small distinguishably physical glow of pleasure as we shook hands.

The immediateness of my shout had been a tribute to more than the absolute identifiability of Freddie Seston; it had been an index of the character of our relationship long ago. Undergraduate friendships were often then – as I suppose they still are – rapidly run-up affairs. The terms went by like summer cruises and there was nothing, really nothing, over which one could afford to waste time. Sets and coteries formed themselves at the double and became surprisingly durable, so that on the whole one went happily through on the strength of the first associations and intimacies that came along. But the system produced the phenomenon of what might be called second-string friendships. A second-string friend would be, typically, a member of a set contiguous or overlapping with one’s own, with whom one had established a mutual unspoken recognition of affinity and compatibility which one’s major commitments didn’t, in those fleeting eight-week spells, leave one the scope fully to explore. My relations with Freddie Seston, as I remembered them, had been like that. It didn’t mean that we hadn’t seen quite a lot of each other – and perhaps as much tête-a-tête as in any other manner. We certainly walked and talked together, and dined seriously and inexpertly in restaurants as even undergraduates only modestly prosperous could do in those days. But we had never visited each other at home, nor I think been introduced to each other’s people. So there had been a considerable potential, so to speak, left in our acquaintance when it had faded out on us.

Freddie had now sat down beside me and we had agreed that the morning was sufficiently far advanced to justify beginning on vermouth. St Mark’s lay straight in front of us – but for all the attention we gave it, that celebrated church might have been the Brompton Oratory or the Methodist Central Hall. We stared at each other with frank curiosity. I think we both felt the absurd sense of triumph which such occasions can produce: it is as if, in revenge for its many slow attritions, one has managed successfully to pull a fast one on Time. Certainly we felt no awkwardness. The second-string convention is really wonderful here. It admits of re-established intimacy at once, while at the same time obviating the slightest need to regard twenty-five years’ silence and disinterest as anything requiring apology.

But this didn’t mean that we wouldn’t give each other pleasure if we could display a little knowledge of each other’s careers. And Freddie got to this first. You took silk some years ago? he asked.

Yes. It’s an easier life, you know. One’s less at people’s beck and call than as a junior. But it’s a gamble on the financial side. Fortunately my wife has an income of her own – enough to cover our children’s education.

"Ah! That’s where I differ from you, Jonathan. I’m unmarried. In fact, fortune-hunting still. Freddie glanced at me swiftly, as if to make sure that our old relationship provided a viable air for pleasantries of this sort. That’s why I’m in Venice. He lowered his voice. In Belmont is a lady richly left, he said. And many Jasons come in quest of her."

Quite a lot about Freddie was coming back to me. He had loved tumbling out scraps of poetry from a ragbag collection in his mind – and particularly in absurd and extravagant contexts. There was a strong vein of fantasy in him. It was quite certain that he wasn’t in Venice for any such purpose as he described. I wish you luck with the caskets, I said. But I hope you’ll find time for other things too. Perhaps another popular book.

I thought this was a good enough way of getting in my first piece of answering knowledge about him. But it produced the effect of a tiny misfire. A popular book? he echoed uncertainly.

I mean popular in the sense of being for readers like myself, as well as for your own learned world. I enjoyed the Bellini tremendously.

Freddie smiled again. Well, yes, he said. I’m here, as a matter of fact, to have a go at Carpaccio. I’m having three or four months at him.

I could recall more about Freddie Seston’s career now. The earlier part of it helped to explain the complete break in our acquaintance. On going down from Oxford he had worked in Paris and Rome, and then had departed to Australia as the Director of an Art Gallery in one of the smaller States. Now he had a similar job in some English industrial town: it might have been Leeds or Birmingham. I wasn’t sure about the details, but I had a feeling that Freddie hadn’t quite got to the top. Not, that is to say, in the way of curating works of art. But he certainly enjoyed considerable authority as an art historian – enough, I’d have supposed at a guess, to make his continued provincial perch a shade invidious. There was something else that I obscurely felt I knew about him. But at the moment it eluded me. It wasn’t to do so for long.

We had a second vermouth. It is a stuff that the Italian sun burns harmlessly away as you drink it.

Three or four months? I said. Lucky chap. Here am I doing a family fortnight – and then back to some thoroughly tiresome briefs.

Your family is here with you? Freddie showed a quick interest that was very agreeable. I’ll have a chance of meeting them?

Yes, indeed – my wife and three daughters. They’ve gone out to Murano this morning, but perhaps you could lunch or dine with us tomorrow? Where are you putting up?

I’m at Danieli’s – just at the moment. Freddie gave me this interesting fact with a shade of hesitation. Perhaps he had taken a guess that my own lodging would be in a modest pensione facing the Giudecca. "But of course I must find myself an apartment quite soon. I’ve been here only a few days. I stopped off in Paris to see Phèdre."

To see—? For a moment I hadn’t quite got this, and had supposed that Freddie was naming an acquaintance.

"Racine’s Phèdre. And then I caught the night flight, because I’d made an appointment with a man at the Belle Arti here next morning. Freddie paused. And on the plane I had quite an odd experience."

Freddie’s manner of announcing this held nothing portentous. He was speaking with a sort of whimsical animation that I remembered very well. But I was prompted to remember too that he had never been exactly an easy chap. One had been aware of a streak of self-consciousness or self-distrust in him that was off- putting at first. And there was something slow about his reaction-time – so that socially he wasn’t a good starter, although he quickly settled down, so to speak, to useful performances at a middle distance. Nothing of this, I now saw, had quite left him. He’d be much more on form at dinner than at a cocktail-party.

On your night flight from Paris? I asked. As Freddie’s personality rounded itself out once more beside me, I found that my pleasure in recovering it was far from diminishing, and I was anxious to hear him talking in his old way.

"Yes. Phèdre, you see, had seemed to be a terrible frost with me. I came out of the theatre with a mind entirely blank to it. Of course it was partly external circumstances. I had to find a car that was waiting for me, and get myself driven rather rapidly to Orly. That didn’t make for effective ruminating upon the processes of poetic drama. There’s near-chaos round about the Place du Theatre Frangais at that hour. And if you want to get quickly across the Rue de Richelieu, and know that you’d better take your cue from a policeman waving a baton and blowing a whistle, the moment’s not propitious for determining whether you’re in the enjoyment of calm of mind, all passion spent. You’d agree?"

I saw no reason not to agree.

Moreover I’m not a literary type. Freddie paused to light a cigarette when he had said this. Still, it was humiliating, in a way. I knew the play, French isn’t difficult to me, and yet – no go. No go, at all. Except that, as I drove out to the airport, a single line from the thing rose up and kept repeating itself in my head. You’d never guess what it was?

"C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée."

Freddie shouted with delighted laughter – so that a group of tourists at another table turned and stared at us. "Exactly! It’s possible, no doubt, that a Frenchman could attend a performance of Hamlet and come away in secure possession only of the words To be or not to be, that is the question. Indeed, it’s quite probable, since the French are like that in the presence of another nation’s poetry. But nothing of the sort made it any less absurd that there I was, having assisted at a performance of Phèdre in the grand manner, and with no better consequence than that of setting its most familiar line nattering at me. I wondered whether it was going to accompany me all the way to Venice."

And did it? I felt it friendly to prompt Freddie. Not that he needed anything of the sort.

"That’s just the point. It didn’t. But now just imagine me, Jonathan, kicking my heels at Orly – for the flight was half an hour late – and feeling really worried about Phèdre. Imagine me, the elderly Director of an obscurely respectable art gallery and museum in the North of England, indulging myself in pallid dubieties about the sufficiency of my responses to an old play."

At this Freddie gave another shout of laughter – so that I rather expected the pigeons to rise up and circle the campanile. And for the first time I looked rather curiously at my old friend. I think it was the phrase pallid dubieties that struck me. There was something professional about it.

I became depressed – but in a mild drab way that was as uninteresting to myself as it would have been to you. Of course airports are depressing anyway. The better-appointed they are, the more does something edgy obtrude itself upon them. Your journey is going to be no more hazardous than one in a suburban train, but nevertheless there remains a vast unnaturalness in the proposal to give yourself to the void. The queer segregations are ominous.

The queer segregations?

Well, yes. For a moment Freddie seemed at a loss, as if he hadn’t really at all decided what the queer segregations were. But in a moment he went on. Think, for instance, how passengers in transit forfeit their right of contact with those transitory only in a larger sense. And although the summoning voices are not so inhumanly hollow as they used to be, that doesn’t the less equate them with the knock on the door in the dark or the last stroke of the hour. And all this was impinging on me at Orly. I tell you, I felt frightfully glum.

As Freddie reached this point in his narrative, he drained his second vermouth and gave me a glance that could be described only as of clear joy. At least, I said, the depression didn’t settle in for good.

"Of course not. It was merely comical. I ought, you see, to have been quite pleased with myself. I was very deftly killing two birds with one stone. It was fun discovering that by tumbling out of Paris at midnight I needn’t miss Phèdre, even although I had an appointment here next morning. And, at the same time, I had what you might call designs upon that night flight."

Designs on it? This entirely puzzled me.

I was going to make a note or two. As he offered this obscure explanation Freddie glanced sharply at me and away again. But I found myself just doubting whether night flights – or at least short hops across the continent – are at all a good idea, even if one has some out-of-the-way design on one. I reflected morosely on the snugness of an earth-bound sleeper, taken possession of at Calais and relinquished only at Venice or Rome. But these were clearly very petty musings. Freddie gave a small happy sigh. So they naturally led me on to some lavishly broad generalisations about my own character.

You used to be not bad at that long ago, I said. More and more of Freddie was coming back to me.

You surprise me, Jonathan. But there I was – seeing too clearly how I have failed to go after anything in a big way, and how inevitably as a consequence I am developing in middle age a resentful sense that life is constantly cheating me of small fleeting satisfactions. Shall we have a third Cinzano?

The manner of my reply came quite out of old times. No, I said. We shall not.

There! Freddie was triumphant. I resent it. Your sense of measure, Jonathan, is impeccable. But I resent its application in this instance. I react against the slightest symbolic suggestion of being denied my whack. How appalling! And it’s the same with my career. At the level of rational calculation, you know, I’ve never wanted one of the London galleries. I get far more time for Bellini and Carpaccio and all that lot under my present conditions. In fact, I get pretty well whatever leave I want.

Isn’t that extremely enlightened of your northern friends?

Of course it’s without pay. Freddie laughed as if this were the greatest joke in the world. "The worthy aldermen who employ me are all for that. And it suits me very well. Still, I don’t manage to be straight with myself about it all. Waiting there at Orly I saw that clearly. Again, how appalling! To return a large insensitive negative to Phèdre, and then catch myself resenting as demeaning – for that was it – my continued association with city councillors and honest mill-owners and unassuming provincial professors! And it was as I glimpsed this, my dear Jonathan,