Read Online A Mysterious Affair of Style by Gilbert Adair - Free Book Online
Authors: Gilbert Adair
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fascinating cases which, just to hear about, caused his mouth literally to water.
He felt old and irrelevant, a back-number. If he offered a suggestion as to how they might proceed on some ongoing case, they would listen politely enough until he had finished speaking, then simply pick up where they had left off as though he himself had never opened his mouth. Contrariwise, if he pointed out some striking resemblance between that ongoing case and one with which he himself had been involved several years back, they would shake their heads with ill-concealed amusement, as though to answer him would merely be to humour him, and they would end by remarking, unfailingly, ‘You know, Mr Trubshawe, things have changed since your day …’
Ah yes, things
had
changed since his day … But if it wouldn’t be true to say that he had got definitively used to his becalmed way of life, at least he had, if one can phrase it so, got used to not getting used to it. Until, that is, he had idly wandered into the tearoom of the Ritz Hotel and heard the unforgettable – and, he realised, never quite forgotten – voice of Evadne Mount, his old sparring partner.
How that same voice, ten years before, had set his false teeth on edge! And how, yesterday, he couldn’t deny it, how it had positively rejuvenated him! As had everything that followed. After tea at the Ritz, a visit to a grand West End theatre, a marvellously funny hoax of which he was just as willing a victim as anybody else in the audience, dinner at the Ivy with Evadne and Cora Rutherford, and finally the shock, but equally (admit it, Trubshawe) the secret thrill, of hearing, before the news hit the headlines, of the death of a famous film director whose name had meant nothing to him just the day before. All that, a good deal more than had happened to him in the past ten years, squeezed into just sixteen hours!
He sat there, at his oblong kitchen table, sucking on his unlit pipe. He had never really looked forward to retirement but had had to resign himself to what was, after all, the ruthless way of a ruthless world. You worked hard for forty years – work, in his case, which he loved unreservedly – and then you retired. Or, as again in his case, you
were
retired.
His own luck, however, had run out almost at once. His wife, with whom he’d looked forward to sharing his retirement, had passed away only a few months after he quit the Yard. His loyal old Labrador, Tobermory, had been shot dead on the moors near ffolkes Manor. Just one exciting thing had happened to him in all the years that followed – meeting Evadne Mount again. Would there be, he wondered wistfully, any more to come?
Naturally, he would never have contemplated ringing her up, even had he known her telephone number. But then a sudden remembrance came to him. What was it she had said? That she could be found at the Ritz every day at teatime. So what if he, Trubshawe, ‘just happened’ to stroll into the hotel one day at around five o’clock and what if he ‘just happened’ to run into her? Oh, not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after tomorrow. Towards the end of the week, perhaps? Or at the beginning of next?
He shook his head sadly. That wouldn’t do at all.
What troubled him wasn’t that Evadne Mount would get ‘the wrong idea’ – considering their respective ages, appearances and dispositions, nothing could be more improbable – but that she would get the right idea. That she would realise at once he’d become a lonely old man whose need for company was such he actually hoped she would accept the terminally lame excuse that he had chanced to drop, yet again, into the poshest hotel in London.
No, forget it. The novelist had re-exited his life as swiftly and casually as he had re-entered hers.
Ho hum. Might as well spend an hour or two in the garden …
Chapter Five
It was five uneventful weeks later, one Sunday in May, as Trubshawe was preparing to wash his car, a chore he
He felt old and irrelevant, a back-number. If he offered a suggestion as to how they might proceed on some ongoing case, they would listen politely enough until he had finished speaking, then simply pick up where they had left off as though he himself had never opened his mouth. Contrariwise, if he pointed out some striking resemblance between that ongoing case and one with which he himself had been involved several years back, they would shake their heads with ill-concealed amusement, as though to answer him would merely be to humour him, and they would end by remarking, unfailingly, ‘You know, Mr Trubshawe, things have changed since your day …’
Ah yes, things
had
changed since his day … But if it wouldn’t be true to say that he had got definitively used to his becalmed way of life, at least he had, if one can phrase it so, got used to not getting used to it. Until, that is, he had idly wandered into the tearoom of the Ritz Hotel and heard the unforgettable – and, he realised, never quite forgotten – voice of Evadne Mount, his old sparring partner.
How that same voice, ten years before, had set his false teeth on edge! And how, yesterday, he couldn’t deny it, how it had positively rejuvenated him! As had everything that followed. After tea at the Ritz, a visit to a grand West End theatre, a marvellously funny hoax of which he was just as willing a victim as anybody else in the audience, dinner at the Ivy with Evadne and Cora Rutherford, and finally the shock, but equally (admit it, Trubshawe) the secret thrill, of hearing, before the news hit the headlines, of the death of a famous film director whose name had meant nothing to him just the day before. All that, a good deal more than had happened to him in the past ten years, squeezed into just sixteen hours!
He sat there, at his oblong kitchen table, sucking on his unlit pipe. He had never really looked forward to retirement but had had to resign himself to what was, after all, the ruthless way of a ruthless world. You worked hard for forty years – work, in his case, which he loved unreservedly – and then you retired. Or, as again in his case, you
were
retired.
His own luck, however, had run out almost at once. His wife, with whom he’d looked forward to sharing his retirement, had passed away only a few months after he quit the Yard. His loyal old Labrador, Tobermory, had been shot dead on the moors near ffolkes Manor. Just one exciting thing had happened to him in all the years that followed – meeting Evadne Mount again. Would there be, he wondered wistfully, any more to come?
Naturally, he would never have contemplated ringing her up, even had he known her telephone number. But then a sudden remembrance came to him. What was it she had said? That she could be found at the Ritz every day at teatime. So what if he, Trubshawe, ‘just happened’ to stroll into the hotel one day at around five o’clock and what if he ‘just happened’ to run into her? Oh, not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after tomorrow. Towards the end of the week, perhaps? Or at the beginning of next?
He shook his head sadly. That wouldn’t do at all.
What troubled him wasn’t that Evadne Mount would get ‘the wrong idea’ – considering their respective ages, appearances and dispositions, nothing could be more improbable – but that she would get the right idea. That she would realise at once he’d become a lonely old man whose need for company was such he actually hoped she would accept the terminally lame excuse that he had chanced to drop, yet again, into the poshest hotel in London.
No, forget it. The novelist had re-exited his life as swiftly and casually as he had re-entered hers.
Ho hum. Might as well spend an hour or two in the garden …
Chapter Five
It was five uneventful weeks later, one Sunday in May, as Trubshawe was preparing to wash his car, a chore he
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