Hindsight by Peter Dickinson

it turns out. I’ve just found who was getting the money from that trust. It happens that the agents who manage Steen’s estate are the same as mine, and they let me take a look at the accounts. It was the simplest way for me to gauge the continuing popularity of the various books. I did this some months ago, but I kept my notes. Last week I started on the second trunk of Molly Benison’s papers and found a bundle of bank statements from the early Thirties. The larger payments are actually detailed in the statements as coming from the trust Steen had set up, and coincide with the amounts accruing from the two books. You follow?’
    â€˜Yes. Yes, of course. But, for God’s sake, she never had a penny! She kept telling us so! She kept saying that was why she had to live in a borrowed greenhouse!’
    â€˜You’ve lost me.’
    â€˜It was a rather grand conservatory, actually, with a gardener’s cottage attached. She’d asked Lord Orne—you know, the chap who actually owned Paddery—if she could live there, and …’
    â€˜She asked him if she might go there for a short rest in the spring of 1939. I’ve found a letter from him dated March 1942, reminding her of the fact and asking if she was yet sufficiently rested. She wasn’t paying any rent, you know.’
    â€˜But that was the idea of Annette having a job.’
    â€˜Lost me again.’
    â€˜Annette Penoyre. She lived with Molly. Molly got her the job teaching Freshers so that she could help pay the rent.’
    â€˜Typical.’
    â€˜Of whom?’
    â€˜Smith. Benison. Everybody, I dare say. Shall we call it a night? I’m keeping you up.’
    â€˜I shan’t sleep now. It’s up to you. I don’t want Steen barging into my book, but it looks to me as though Molly must have meant more to him than the other women you describe, and that’s why he left her the money. Is there any chance she had a child by him?’
    â€˜No. She lived so publicly. I’ve been into that. As far as I can make out there wasn’t a moment in the period when she wasn’t in some gossip column or other once a week. On the other hand Steen certainly pursued her with some vehemence for a couple of years. They spent a lot of one summer sailing off southern Italy. It was a fair-sized boat and they kept it pretty full of friends who came and went. That’s when Dufy did that picture of her lying naked on the fishing nets. I’ve a snapshot of her sitting on a deck with no clothes on which I think must date from that trip. I suppose she and Steen must sometimes have been left on their own, and letters and diaries from visitors seem to assume they were sleeping together pretty routinely. On the other hand there’s a letter from Lawrence to David Garnett, bitchy even by his standards, which says Benison was deliberately keeping Steen in a permanent state of rut without letting him get anywhere. She did this with other men, both before and after. There are quite a few accounts of men trying to burst into her room at house-parties, or of her bursting out in the small hours because she’d let them in and then they wouldn’t play the game by her rules.’
    â€˜Yes, I’ve read about that.’
    â€˜It was a game, literally, for her. She had a passion for party games—I suppose because she never had a chance to play them as a child. I was reminded of this by your account of her creeping up behind you when you were hiding.’
    â€˜She was always extraordinarily kind to me after that.’
    â€˜Oh, yes. She was often forgiving would-be rapists.’
    â€˜You sound as though you don’t much care for her.’
    â€˜I have developed a most unscholarly antipathy to the woman. I feel she is doing her damnedest to prevent me writing my book—leading­ me on and then turfing me out of the room.’
    â€˜I take it you don’t think even Steen made