David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt was making his way to the village of Moulsford on the Thames once more. He was going to call on Hermione, widow of the murdered Randolph Colville. He had felt it only polite to delay his visit until now when the death and the funeral were a little time in the past and the pain of bereavement, while still harsh, might not be as sharp as before. Looking up from his notebook he noticed that his train was slowing down. They were enveloped in white mist. Out of the left-hand window it hung in fronds or tendrils as if attached to an invisible washing line. Two ghostly horses stood still about fifty yards from his carriage, pale riders waiting to gallop off to some brighter future. On the other side the mist was packed close, so dense that you could only see for a couple of yards. The train was now advancing slowly through this other world. Powerscourt suddenly remembered coming out of the Hotel Danieli on the Venetian sea front early one morning and finding that the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, even the Lion of St Mark on his pillar had all disappeared in a dense Venetian fog. Only the water told you it was still there, he recalled, lapping ceaselessly against the quays. After a couple of minutes the mist vanished as quickly as it had arrived. A pale November sun broke through the clouds casting a light that danced on the blue waters of the Thames.

It was shortly after half past ten when a diminutive butler showed Powerscourt into an upstairs drawing room looking out over the river. On the left of the corridor at the top of the stairs he glimpsed a room that seemed to be full of guns of every description. Hermione Colville was sitting in a high-backed chair by a great window with a fine view over the Thames. She was dressed entirely in black. To her left, on a small circular table, was a large goblet. Behind that stood a bottle of wine, presumably white, in a cooler. Powerscourt wondered briefly when she started drinking, this bereaved woman. Ten o’clock? Half past nine? Her voice, however, sounded perfectly sober.

‘Good morning to you, Lord Powerscourt. How very kind of you to come and see me in my widow’s weeds. I understand you are not having much success in your investigation so far. Is that correct?’ She took another mouthful of her wine. Presumably, Powerscourt thought, she got the stuff cheap from Colvilles. Perhaps they sent it up from London in a barge. He wondered how much malice there was in her words.

‘I am most grateful to you for seeing me this morning, Mrs Colville. It is true what you say about my investigation. So far it is not going as well as I would like.’

‘Is that because it is a particularly difficult investigation or because you are not a particularly skilled investigator?’

Powerscourt smiled politely. What should have been a perfectly innocuous conversation was turning into a skirmish. ‘I couldn’t possibly say anything to that, Mrs Colville, but let me proceed with my business. Forgive me if I ask you about your husband at such a time as this but it often helps to talk to those closest to him. Could I ask first of all if you have a photograph of your husband I might borrow?’

Hermione Colville walked rather unsteadily to a little table by the side of the fireplace and gave him a family snapshot.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sure this will be a great help. In the weeks before his death, Mrs Colville, did he show any signs of anxiety? Would you have said he was worried about something? Did he have a problem on his mind?’

‘No is the answer to all those questions. I cannot see what use they are to you or anybody else. They won’t bring Randolph back.’ She took another large mouthful from her glass and looked defiantly at her visitor.

‘Would you have said your husband had any enemies, Mrs Colville? Perhaps I should say many enemies? People high up in business often do.’

‘He didn’t talk to me about things like that. We didn’t have that kind of marriage, if you want to know.’

‘No?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Well, he was away a lot in France. One of the children used to say he only had half a father because his papa was only here half the time.’ She paused to take another mouthful and then rang a small bell. The diminutive butler appeared as if by magic and popped another opened bottle into the cooler. He slipped out as unobtrusively as he had come. The whole manoeuvre had taken less than thirty seconds.

‘Did your husband have any money concerns, Mrs Colville? Any conversations about the times being bad for business?’

‘I told you, Lord Powerscourt, we didn’t have that sort of marriage.’ Her words were beginning to sound slurred now. Powerscourt wondered if one bottle was going to make her drunk. Then it would be the second bottle and the slow descent into incoherence. Madam is not available in the afternoons, my lord. Maybe he had only got here just in time.

Powerscourt thought he would take a chance, draw a bow at a venture. ‘What kind of marriage would you say you did have, Mrs Colville?’

She looked at him with contempt. She stared defiantly at the view outside her great window, a pair of oarsmen making their way downstream, a heron standing proudly on the bank. If you listened very carefully in that Colville drawing room you could just catch the distant screeching of the gulls. Hermione Colville took another glass of her wine. Powerscourt saw from the label that it was a Chablis. He didn’t suppose Colvilles drank vin ordinaire .

‘What kind of marriage did I have? How long have you got, Lord Powerscourt? It was all right at the beginning. I think most of them are all right at the beginning, or so I’ve been told. I’ve carried out a lot of research into marriages with the women of my acquaintance, you know. Sometimes I think I should have been made a Professor of Unhappy Marriage like that man who’s Professor of Mind and Logic at University College up in London. After a couple of years things begin to go off. Some husbands like little children. Most don’t. Mine didn’t. Being children themselves most husbands resent the amount and the extent of love their wives expend on their children. It’s the love they can’t stand, I think. The love pours out of the mothers into the children. The husbands don’t think they get that sort of unconditional love any more. So some of them look elsewhere. Business keeps them in London overnight. In my case business took Randolph off to France a lot. He had to work very hard when he was there. He was always exhausted when he came home. Sometimes, now the children have left home – they can be so cruel, children, without ever realizing it – I feel like an empty wine bottle. My goodness has all gone, it’s been spent, or consumed, or drunk. Now I’m just a glass shell waiting for the rubbish collection and a last few hours before being smashed to pieces.’

She paused for another drink. Her head was beginning to sway slightly. Powerscourt felt desperately sorry for her.

‘So there you have it, Lord Powerscourt. Ours was a perfectly normal middle-class marriage. There are thousands more like it across the squares of Kensington and Chelsea and the grander houses of the Home Counties. Perfectly normal.’ Hermione Colville began to weep, very gently and very quietly. The tears ran down her cheeks and on to her black silk shirt. Powerscourt fell into the male role in such occasions and offered his handkerchief as a substitute for comfort. There were a number of questions he wanted to ask but he felt the time was not right.

‘We’ve often wondered, you know,’ she looked at him through her tears, ‘the women of my acquaintance and myself, whether we would have been happier if we had never married, if we’d never known the terrible unhappiness marriage sometimes brings. And do you know what most of us conclude? That in spite of everything, all the bad times, we would still rather have had to endure those than to live alone as a spinster in some damp little place in Battersea or go on living at home and watch our parents falling to pieces until they died.’