The telegraph wires swooped and the earth whirled round the carriage window; and Bee’s mind swooped and whirled with them.
“I would have come down to see you, of course,” Mr. Sandal had said on the telephone. “It is against all my principles to deal with such grave matters by telephone. But I was afraid that my presence might suggest to the children that there was something serious afoot. And it would be a pity to upset them if there is a chance that — that the trouble is temporary.”
Poor dear old Sandal. He had been very kind; had asked her if she were sitting down, before he broke the news; and had said: “You’re not feeling faint, are you, Miss Ashby?” when his shock had been administered.
She had not fainted. She had sat for a long time letting her knees get back their strength, and then she had gone to her room and looked for photographs of Patrick. Except for a studio group taken when Simon and Patrick were ten and Eleanor nine, she seemed to have nothing. She was not a snapshot-keeper.
Nora had been a passionate collector of her children’s photographs, but she had spurned photograph albums, which she held to be “a great waste of time and space.” (Nora had never wasted anything; it had been as if she was half conscious that her allotted time was short.) She had kept them all in a tattered and bursting manila envelope with O.H.M.S. on it, and the envelope went everywhere with her. It had gone to Europe on that holiday with her, and had made part of that blaze on the Kent coast.
Balked of photographs, Bee went up to the old nursery, as if there she would get nearer to the child Patrick, although she knew very well that nothing of Patrick’s remained there. Simon had burned them all. It was the only sign he had given that his twin’s death was more than he could well bear. Simon had gone away to school after Patrick’s death, and when he came back for the summer holidays he had behaved normally, if one took it for granted that not mentioning Patrick was in the circumstances normal enough. And then one day Bee had come on him tending a bonfire where the children had made their “Red Indian” and campfires, beyond the shrubbery, and on the fire were Patrick’s toys and other small belongings. Even exercise books, she noticed, had been brought down to feed the flames. Books and childish paintings and the silly horse that had hung at the end of his bed; Simon was burning them all.
He had been furious when he saw her. He had moved between her and the fire, standing at bay, as it were, and glared at her.
“I don’t want them around,” he had said, almost shouting.
“I understand, Simon,” she had said, and had gone away.
So there was nothing of Patrick in the old nursery under the eaves; and not very much of the other children, after all. When this had been Bee’s own nursery it had been ugly and individual and furnished largely with rejections from the other parts of the house. It had patterned linoleum, and a rag rug, and a cuckoo clock, and crazy basket chairs, and a clothes-horse, and a deal table covered with a red rep tablecloth trimmed with bobbles and marked with ink-stains; and coloured prints of “Bubbles” and similar masterpieces hung against a cabbage-rose wallpaper. But Nora had done it over, so that it became an illustration from a homemaker magazine, in powder-blue and white, with a wallpaper of nursery-rhyme characters. Only the cuckoo clock had stayed.
The children had been happy there, but had left no mark on it. Now that it was empty and tidy, it looked just like something in a furniture shop window.
She had gone back to her own room, baffled and sick at heart, and had packed a small bag for her use in the morning. To-morrow she must go up to town and face this new emergency in the history of the Ashbys.
“Do you believe, yourself, that it is Patrick?” she had asked.
But Mr. Sandal could give her no assurance.
“He has not the air of a pretender,” he allowed. “And if he is not Patrick, then who is he? The Ashby family resemblance has always been abnormally strong. And there is no other son of this generation.”
“But Patrick would have written,” she said.
That is the thought she always went back to. Patrick would never have left her in grief and doubt all those years. Patrick would have written. It couldn’t be Patrick.
Then if it wasn’t Patrick, who was it?
Round and round went her mind, swooping and whirling.
“You will be the best judge,” Mr. Sandal had said. “Of those now living you are the one who knew the boy best.”
“There is Simon,” she had said.
“But Simon was a boy at the time and boys forget, don’t they? You were grown up.”
So the onus was being put upon her. But how was she to know? She who had loved Patrick but now could hardly remember what he looked like at thirteen. What test would there be?
Or would she know at once when she saw him that he was Patrick? Or that he — wasn’t?
And if he wasn’t and yet insisted that he was, what would happen? Would he bring a claim? Make a court action of it? Drag them all through the publicity of the daily Press?
And if he was Patrick, what of Simon? How would he take the resurrection of a brother he had not seen for eight years? The loss of a fortune. Would he be glad about it, fortune or no, or would he hate his brother?
The coming-of-age celebrations would have to be postponed, that was clear. They were much too close now for anything to be decided by that time. What excuse should they make?
But oh, if it could, by some miracle, be Patrick, she would be free of that haunting horror, that thought of the boy who regretted too late to come back.
Her mind was still swooping and swirling as she climbed the stairs to the offices of Cosset, Thring and Noble.
“Ah, Miss Ashby,” Mr. Sandal said. “This is a shocking dilemma. A most unprecedented —— Do sit down. You must be exhausted. A dreadful ordeal for you. Sit down, sit down. Mercer, some tea for Miss Ashby.”
“Did he say why he didn’t write, all those years?” she asked; this being the all-important thing in her mind.
“He said something about ‘perhaps preferring to be dead’.”
“Oh.”
“A psychological difficulty, no doubt,” Mr. Sandal said, proffering comfort.
“Then you believe it is Patrick?”
“I mean, if it is Patrick, his ‘preferring to be dead’ would no doubt arise from the same psychological difficulty as did his running away.”
“Yes. I see. I suppose so. Only — it is so unlike Patrick. Not to write, I mean.”
“It was unlike Patrick to run away.”
“Yes; there is that. He certainly wasn’t a runner-away by nature. He was a sensitive child but very brave. Something must have gone very wrong.” She sat silent for a moment. “And now he is back.”
“We hope so; we hope so.”
“Did he seem quite normal to you?”
“Excessively,” said Mr. Sandal, with a hint of dryness in his tone.
“I looked for photographs of Patrick, but there is nothing later than this.” She produced the studio group. “The children had studio portraits taken regularly every three years, from the time they were babies. This was the last of them. The new one would have been taken in the summer of the year that Bill and Nora were killed; the year Patrick — disappeared. Patrick is ten there.”
She watched while Mr. Sundal studied the small immature face.
“No,” he said at last. “It is impossible to say anything from so early a photograph. As I said before, the family likeness is very strong. At that age they are just young Ashbys, aren’t they? Without any great individuality.” He looked up from studying the photograph and went on: “I am hoping that when you yourself see the boy — the young man — you will have no doubt one way or another. After all, it is not entirely a matter of likeness, this recognition, is it? There is an aura of — of personality.”
“But — but if I am not sure? What is to happen if I am not sure?”
“About that: I think I have found a way out. I dined last night with my young friend Kevin Macdermott.”
“The K.C.?”
“Yes. I was greatly distressed, of course, and told him of my difficulty, and he comforted me greatly by assuring me that identification would be a quite simple matter. It was merely an affair of teeth.”
“Teeth? But Patrick had quite ordinary teeth.”
“Yes, yes. But he had no doubt been to a dentist, and dentists have records. Indeed, most dentists have a sort of visual memory, I understand, of mouths they have treated — a very grim thought — and would almost recognise one at sight. But the record will certainly show ——” He caught the look on Bee’s face and paused. “What is the matter?”
“The children went to Hammond.”
“Hammond? Well? That is simple, isn’t it? If you don’t definitely identify the boy as Patrick, we have only to ——” He broke off. “Hammond!” he said quietly. “Oh!”
“Yes,” Bee said, agreeing with the tone of the monosyllable.
“Dear me, how unfortunate. How very unfortunate.”
Into the subsequent silence Mr. Sandal said miserably: “I think I ought to tell you that Kevin Macdermott thinks the boy is lying.”
“What could Mr. Macdermott possibly know about it,” said Bee angrily. “He has not even seen him!” And as Mr. Sandal went on sitting in miserable silence, “Well?”
“It was only Kevin’s opinion on the hypothesis.”
“I know, but why did he think that?”
“He said it was a — a ‘phoney thing to come straight to a lawyer’.”
“What nonsense! It was a very sensible thing to do.”
“Yes. That was his point. It was too sensible. Too pat. Everything, Kevin said, was too pat for his liking. He said a boy coming home after years away would go home.”
“Then he doesn’t know Patrick. That is just what Patrick would have done: broken it gently by going to the family lawyer first. He was always the most thoughtful and unselfish of creatures. I don’t think much of the clever Mr. Macdermott’s analysis.”
“I felt it only right to tell you everything,” Mr. Sandal said, still miserably.
“Yes, of course,” Bee said kindly, recovering her temper. “Did you tell Mr. Macdermott that Patrick — that the boy had remembered crying at Olympia? I mean, that he had volunteered the information.”
“I did; yes.”
“And he still thought the boy was lying?”
“That was part of the ‘patness’ he professed not to like.”
Bee gave a small snort. “What a mind!” she said. “I suppose that is what a court practice does.”
“It is a detached mind, that is all. One not emotionally engaged in the matter, as we are. It behooves us to keep our minds detached.”
“Yes, of course,” Bee said, sobered. “Well, now that poor old Hammond is to be no help to us — they never found him, did you know? Everything was just blown to dust.”
“Yes. Yes, so I heard; poor fellow.”
“Now that we have no physical evidence, I suppose we have to rely on the boy’s own story. I mean, on checking it. I suppose that can be done.”
“Oh, quite easily. It is all quite straightforward, with dates and places. That is what Kevin found so —— Yes. Yes. Of course it can be checked. And of course I am sure that it will check. He would not have offered us information which would be proved nonsense.”
“So really there is nothing to wait for.”
“No, I—— No.”
Bee braced herself.
“Then how soon can you arrange for me to meet him?”
“Well — I have been thinking about it, and I don’t think, you know, that it should be arranged at all.”
“What?”
“What I should like to do — with your permission and co-operation — would be to, as it were, walk in on him. Go and see him unannounced. So that you would see him as he is and not as he wants you to see him. If we made an appointment here at the office, he would ——”
“Yes, I see. I understand. I agree to that. Can we go now?”
“I don’t see why not. I really don’t see why not,” Mr. Sandal said in that regretful tone that lawyers use when they cannot see any reason why not. “There is, of course, the chance that he may be out. But we can at least go and see. Ah, here is your tea! Will you drink it while Mercer asks Simspon to ask Willett to get us a taxi?”
“You haven’t got anything stronger, have you?” Bee asked.
“I’m afraid not; I’m afraid not. I have never succumbed to the transatlantic custom of the bottle in the office. But Willett will get you anything you may ——”
“Oh, no, thank you; it’s all right. I’ll drink the tea. They say the effects are much more lasting, anyway.”
Mr. Sandal looked as though he would like to pat her encouragingly on the shoulder, but could not make up his mind to it. He was really a very kind little man, she thought, but just — just not much of a prop.
“Did he explain why he chose the name Farrar?” she asked, when they were seated in the taxi.
“He didn’t explain anything,” Mr. Sandal said, falling back on his dry tone.
“Did you gather that he was badly off?”
“He did not mention money, but he seemed very well-dressed in a slightly un-English fashion.”
“There was no suggestion of a loan?”
“Oh, no. Oh, dear me, no.”
“Then he hasn’t come back just because he is broke,” Bee said, and felt somehow pleased. She sat back and relaxed a little. Perhaps everything was going to be all right.
“I have never quite understood why Pimlico descended so rapidly in the social scale,” said Mr. Sandal, breaking the silence as they travelled down the avenues of pretentious porches. “It has fine wide streets, and little through-traffic, and no more smuts than its neighbours. Why should the well-to-do have deserted it and yet stayed in Belgravia? Very puzzling.”
“There is a sort of suction about desertion,” Bee said, trying to meet him on the small-talk level. “The local Lady Almighty occasions the draught by leaving, and the rest, in descending order of importance, follow in her wake. And the poorer people flood in from either side to fill the vacuum. Is this the place?”
Her dismay took possession of her again as she looked at the dismal front of the house; at the peeling paint and the stained stucco, the variety of drab curtains at the windows, the unswept doorway and the rubbed-out house-number on the horrible pillar.
The front door was open and they walked in.
A different card on each door in the hallway proclaimed the fact that the house was let out in single rooms.
“The address is 59K,” Mr. Sandal said. “I take it that K is the number of the room.”
“They begin on the ground floor and work upwards,” Bee said. “This is B on my side.” So they mounted.
“H,” said Bee, peering at a first-floor door. “It’s up the next flight.”
The second floor was also the top one. They stood together on the dark landing listening to the silence. He is out, she thought, he is out, and I shall have to go through all this again.
“Have you a match?” she said.
“I and J,” she read, on the two front-room doors.
Then it was the back one.
They stood in the dark for a moment, staring at it. Then Mr. Sandal moved purposively forward and knocked.
“Come in!” said a voice. It was a deep, boy’s voice; quite unlike Simon’s light sophisticated tones.
Bee, being half a head taller than Mr. Sandal, could see over his shoulder; and her first feeling was one of shock that he should be so much more like Simon than Patrick ever was. Her mind had been filled with images of Patrick: vague, blurred images that she strove to make clear so that she could compare them with the adult reality. Her whole being had been obsessed with Patrick for the last twenty-four hours.
And now here was someone just like Simon.
The boy got up from where he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and with no haste or embarrassment pulled from off his left hand the sock he had been darning. She couldn’t imagine Simon darning a sock.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Mr. Sandal. “I hope you don’t mind: I’ve brought you a visitor.” He moved aside to let Bee come in. “Do you know who this is?”
Bee’s heart hammered on her ribs as she met the boy’s light calm gaze and watched him identify her.
“You do your hair differently,” he said.
Yes, of course; hairdressing had changed completely in those eight years; of course he would see a difference.
“You recognise her, then?” Mr. Sandal said.
“Yes, of course. It’s Aunt Bee.”
She waited for him to come forward to greet her, but he made no move to. After a moment’s pause he turned to find a seat for her.
“I’m afraid there is only one chair. It is all right if you don’t lean back on it,” he said, picking up one of those hard chairs with a black curved back and a tan seat with small holes in it. Bee was glad to sit down on it.
“Do you mind the bed?” he said to Mr. Sandal.
“I’ll stand, thank you, I’ll stand,” Mr. Sandal said hastily.
The details of the face were not at all like Simon’s, she thought; watching the boy stick the needle carefully in the sock. It was the general impression that was the same; once you really looked at him the startling resemblance vanished, and only the family likeness remained.
“Miss Ashby could not wait for a meeting at my office, so I brought her here,” Mr. Sandal said. “You don’t seem particularly ——” He allowed the sentence to speak for itself.
The boy looked at her in a friendly unsmiling way and said: “I’m not very sure of my welcome.”
It was a curiously immobile face. A face like a child’s drawing, now she came to think of it. Everything in the right place and with the right proportions, but without animation. Even the mouth had the straight uncompromising line that is a child’s version of a mouth.
He moved over to lay the socks on the dressing-table, and she saw that he was lame.
“Have you hurt your leg?” she asked.
“I broke it. Over in the States.”
“But should you be walking about on it if it is still tender?”
“Oh, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s just short.”
“Short! You mean, permanently short?”
“It looks like it.”
They were sensitive lips, she noticed, for all their thinness; they gave him away when he said that.
“But something can be done about that,” she said. “It just means that it was mended badly. I expect you didn’t have a very good surgeon.”
“I don’t remember a surgeon. Perhaps I passed out. They did all the correct things: hung weights on the end of it, and all that.”
“But Pat ——” she began, and failed to finish his name.
Into the hiatus he said: “You don’t have to call me anything until you are sure.”
“They do miracles in surgery nowadays,” she said, covering her break. “How long ago is it since it happened?”
“I’d have to think. About a couple of years now, I think.”
Except for the flat American a, his speech was without peculiarity.
“Well, we must see what can be done about it. A horse, was it?”
“Yes. I wasn’t quick enough. How did you know it was a horse?”
“You told Mr. Sandal that you had worked with horses. Did you enjoy that?” Just like railway-carriage small-talk, she thought.
“It’s the only life I do enjoy.”
She forgot about small-talk. “Really?” she said, pleased. “Were they good horses, those western ones?”
“Most of them were commoners, of course. Very good stuff for their work — which, after all, is being a good horse, I suppose. But every now and then you come across one with blood. Some of those are beauties. More — more individual than I ever remember English horses being.”
“Perhaps in England we ‘manner’ the individuality out of them. I hadn’t thought of it. Did you have a horse of your own at all?”
“Yes, I had one. Smoky.”
She noticed the change in his voice when he said it. As audible as the flat note in the cracked bell of a chime.
“A grey?”
“Yes, a dark grey with black points. Not that hard, iron colour, you know. A soft, smoky colour. When he had a tantrum he was just a whirling cloud of smoke.”
A whirling cloud of smoke. She could see it. He must love horses to be able to see them like that. He must particularly have loved his Smoky.
“What happened to Smoky?”
“I sold him.”
No trespassers. Very well, she would not trespass. He had probably had to sell the horse when he broke his leg.
She began to hope very strenuously that this was Patrick.
The thought recalled her to the situation which she had begun to lose sight of. She looked doubtfully at Mr. Sandal.
Catching the appeal in her glance, Mr. Sandal said: “Miss Ashby is no doubt prepared to vouch for you, but you will understand that the matter needs more clarification. If it were a simple matter of a prodigal’s homecoming, your aunt’s acceptance of you would no doubt be sufficient to restore you to the bosom of your family. But in the present instance it is a matter of property. Of the ultimate destination of a fortune. And the law will require incontrovertible evidence of your identity before you could be allowed to succeed to anything that was Patrick Ashby’s. I hope you understand our position.”
“I understand perfectly. I shall, of course, stay here until you have made your inquiries and are satisfied.”
“But you can’t stay here,” Bee said, looking with loathing at the room and the forest of chimney-pots beyond the window.
“I have stayed in a great many worse places.”
“Perhaps. That is no reason for staying here. If you need money we can give you some, you know.”
“I’ll stay here, thanks.”
“Are you just being independent?”
“No. It’s quiet here. And handy. And bung full of privacy. When you have lived in bunk houses you put a high value on privacy.”
“Very well, you stay here. Is there anything else we can — can stake you to?”
“I could do with another suit.”
“Very well. Mr. Sandal will advance whatever you need for that.” She suddenly remembered that if he went to the Ashby tailor there would be a sensation. So she added: “And he will give you the address of his tailor.”
“Why not Walters?” said the boy.
For a moment she could not speak.
“Aren’t they there any more?”
“Oh, yes; but there would be too many explanations if you went to Walters.” She must keep a hold on herself. Anyone could find out who the Ashby tailor had been.
“Oh, yes. I see.”
She fell back on small-talk and began to take her leave.
“We have not told the family about you,” she said, as she prepared to go. “We thought it better not to, until things are — are what Mr. Sandal calls clarified.”
A flash of amusement showed in his eyes at that. For a moment they were allied in a secret laughter.
“I understand.”
She turned at the door to say good-bye. He was standing in the middle of the room watching her go, leaving Mr. Sandal to shepherd her out. He looked remote and lonely. And she thought: “If this is Patrick, Patrick come home again, and I am leaving him like this, as if he were a casual acquaintance ——” It was more than she could bear, the thought of the boy’s loneliness.
She went back to him, took his face lightly in her gloved hand, and kissed his cheek. “Welcome back, my dear,” she said.
So Cosset, Thring and Noble began their investigations, and Bee went back to Latchetts to deal with the problem of postponing the coming-of-age celebrations.
Was she to tell the children now, before the thing was certain? And if not, what excuse could she possibly put forward for not celebrating at the proper time?
Mr. Sandal was against telling the children yet. The unknown Kevin’s verdict had left a mark on him, it seemed; and he was entirely prepared to find a flaw in the so-complete dossier that had been handed to them. It would be inadvisable, he thought, to bring the children into this until the claim had been sifted through the finest mesh.
With that she agreed. If this thing passed — if that boy in the back room in Pimlico was not Patrick — they need never know anything about it. Simon would probably have to be told, so that he could be warned against future attempts at fraud, but by that time it would be of no more than academic interest; a quite impersonal affair. Her present difficulty was how to reconcile the children’s ignorance with the postponing of the celebrations.
The person who rescued her from this dilemma was Great-uncle Charles, who cabled to announce his (long overdue) retirement, and his hope to be present at his great-nephew’s coming-of-age party. He was on his way home from the Far East, and, since he refused to fly, his homecoming was likely to be a protracted one, but he hoped Simon would keep the champagne corked till he came.
Great-uncles do not normally cut much ice in the families in which they survive, but to the Ashbys Great-uncle Charles was much more than a great-uncle: he was a household word. Every birthday had been made iridescent and every Christmas a tingling expectation by the thought of Great-uncle Charles’s present. There were reasonable bounds to the possible presents of parents; and Father Christmas’s were merely the answer to indents.
But neither reason nor bounds had any connection with presents from Great-uncle Charles. Once he had sent a set of chopsticks, which upset nursery discipline for a week. And once it had been the skin of a snake; the glory of owning the skin of a snake had made Simon dizzy for days. And Eleanor still ran to and from her bath in a pair of odd-smelling leather slippers that had come on her twelfth birthday. At least four times every year Great-uncle Charles became the most important factor in the Ashby family; and when you have been of first importance four times a year for twenty years your importance is pretty considerable. Simon might grumble and the others protest a little, but they would without doubt wait for Great-uncle Charles.
Besides, she had a shrewd idea that Simon would not be willing to offend the last-surviving Ashby of his generation. Charles was not rich — he had been far too liberal a giver all his life — but he was comfortably off; and Simon, for all his careless good nature and easy charm, was an exceedingly practical person.
So the postponement was taken by the family with resignation, and by Clare with equanimity. It was held to be a very proper thing that the Ashbys should wait until the old boy could be present. Bee spent her after-dinner leisure altering the date on the invitation cards, and thanking heaven for the mercifulness of chance.
Bee was at odds with herself these days. She wanted this boy to be Patrick; but it would be so much better for all concerned, she felt, if he proved not to be Patrick. Seven-eighths of her wanted Patrick back; warm, and alive, and dear; wanted it passionately. The other eighth shrank from the upheaval of the happy Ashby world that his return would bring with it. When she caught this renegade eighth at its work she reproved it and was suitably ashamed of herself; but she could not destroy it. And so she was distrait and short-tempered, and Ruth, commenting on it to Jane, said:
“Do you think she can have a Secret Sorrow?”
“I expect the books won’t balance,” Jane said. “She’s a very bad adder-up.”
Mr. Sandal reported from time to time on the progress of the investigations, and the reports were uniform and monotonous. Everything seemed to confirm the boy’s story.
“The most heartening thing, using the word in its sense of reassurance,” Mr. Sandal said, “is that the young man seems to have no contacts since he came to England. He has lived at that address since the Philadelphia’s arrival, and he has had neither letters nor visitors. The woman who owns the house occupies one of the front rooms on the ground floor. She is one of those women who has nothing to do but sit back and watch her neighbours. The lives of her tenants seem to be an open book to the good lady. She is also accustomed to waiting for the postman and collecting the letters he drops. Nothing escapes her. Her description of myself was, I understand, hardly flattering but quite touching in its fidelity. The young man could therefore have hardly had visitors without her being aware of it. He was out all day, of course; as any young man in London would be. But there is no trace of that intimacy which would suggest connivance. He had no friends.”
The young man came willingly to the office and answered questions freely. With Bee’s consent, Kevin Macdermott had “sat in” at one of these office conferences, and even Kevin had been shaken. “What shakes me,” Kevin had said, “is not the fellow’s knowledge of the subject — all good con. men are glib — but the general cut of his jib. He’s quite frankly not what I expected. After a little while in my job you develop a smell for a wrong ’un. This chap has me baffled. He doesn’t smell like a crook to me, and yet the set-up stinks.”
So the day came when Mr. Sandal announced to Bee that Cosset, Thring and Noble were now prepared to accept the claimant as Patrick Ashby, the eldest son of William Ashby of Latchetts, and to hand over to him everything that was due to him. There would be legal formalities, of course, since the fact of his death eight years ago had been presumed; but they would be automatic. As far as they, Cosset, Thring and Noble, were concerned, Patrick Ashby was free to go home whenever he pleased.
So the moment had come, and Bee was faced with breaking the news to the family.
Her instinct was to tell Simon first, privately; but she felt that anything that set him apart from the others in this matter of welcoming back his brother was to be avoided. It would be better to take for granted that for Simon, as for the others, the news would be a matter for unqualified happiness.
It was after lunch on a Sunday that she told them.
“I have something to tell you that will be rather a shock to you. But a nice kind of shock,” she said. And went on from there. Patrick had not committed suicide, as they had thought. He had merely run away. And now he had come back. He had been living for a little in London because, of course, he had to prove to the lawyers that he was Patrick. But he had had no difficulty in doing that. And now he was going to come home.
She had avoided looking at their faces as she talked; it was easier just to talk into space, impersonally. But in the startled silence that followed her story she looked across at Simon; and for a moment did not recognise him. The shrunk white face with the blazing eyes had no resemblance to the Simon she knew. She looked away hastily.
“Does it mean that this new brother will get all the money that is Simon’s?” asked Jane, with her usual lack of finesse.
“Well, I think it was a horrible thing to do,” Eleanor said bluntly.
“What was?”
“Running away and leaving us all thinking he was dead.”
“He didn’t know that, of course. I mean: that we would take his note to mean that he was going to kill himself.”
“Even so. He left us all without a word for — for — how long is it? Seven years? Nearly eight years. And then comes back one day without warning, and expects us to welcome him.”
“Is he nice?” asked Ruth.
“What do you mean by nice?” Bee asked, glad for once of Ruth’s interest in the personal.
“Is he nice to look at? And does he talk nicely or has he a frightful accent?”
“He is exceedingly nice to look at, and he has no accent whatsoever.”
“Where has he been all this time?” Eleanor asked.
“Mexico and the States, mostly.”
“Mexico!” said Ruth. “How romantic! Does he wear a black sailor hat?”
“A what? No, of course he doesn’t. He wears a hat like anyone else.”
“How often have you seen him, Aunt Bee?” Eleanor asked.
“Just once. A few weeks ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about it then?”
“It seemed better to wait until the lawyers were finished with him and he was ready to come home. You couldn’t all go rushing up to London to see him.”
“No, I suppose not. But I expect Simon would have liked to go up and see him, wouldn’t you, Simon, and we wouldn’t have minded? After all, Patrick was his twin.”
“I don’t believe for one moment that it is Patrick,” Simon said, in a tight, careful voice that was worse than shouting.
“But, Simon!” Eleanor said.
Bee sat in a dismayed silence. This was worse than she had anticipated.
“But, Simon! Aunt Bee has seen him. She must know.”
“Aunt Bee seems to have adopted him.”
Much worse than she had anticipated.
“The people who have adopted him, Simon, are Cosset, Thring and Noble. A not very emotional firm, I think you’ll agree. If there had been the faintest doubt of his being Patrick, Cosset, Thring and Noble would have discovered it during those weeks. They have left no part of his life since he left England unaccounted for.”
“Of course whoever it is has had a life that can be checked! What did they expect? But what possible reason can they have for believing that he is Patrick?”
“Well, for one thing, he is your double.”
This was clearly unexpected. “My double?” he said vaguely.
“Yes. He is even more like you than when he went away.”
The colour had come back to Simon’s face and the stuff on the bones had begun to look like flesh again; but now he looked stupid, like a boxer who is taking too much punishment.
“Believe me, Simon dear,” she said, “it is Patrick!”
“It isn’t. I know it isn’t. You are all being fooled!”
“But, Simon!” Eleanor said. “Why should you think that? I know it won’t be easy for you to have Patrick back — it won’t be easy for any of us — but there’s no use making a fuss about it. The thing is there and we just have to accept it. You are only making things worse by trying to push it away.”
“How did this — this creature who says he is Patrick, how did he get to Mexico? How did he leave England? And when? And where?”
“He left from Westover in a ship called the Ira Jones.”
“Westover! Who says so?”
“He does. And according to the harbourmaster, a ship of that name did leave Westover on the night that Patrick went missing.”
Since this seemed to leave Simon without speech, she went on: “And everything he did from then on has been checked. The hotel he worked at in Normandy is no longer there, but they have found the ship he sailed from Havre in — it’s a tramp, but it belongs to a firm in Brest — and people have been shown photographs and identified him. And so on, all the way back to England. Till the day he walked into Mr. Sandal’s office.”
“Is that how he came back?” Eleanor asked. “Went to see old Mr. Sandal?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I should say that proves that he is Patrick, if anyone is in any doubt about it. But I don’t know why there should be doubt at all. After all, it would be very easy to catch him out if he wasn’t Patrick, wouldn’t it? All the family things he wouldn’t know....”
“It isn’t Patrick.”
“It is a shock for you, Simon, my dear,” Bee said, “and, as Eleanor says, it won’t be easy for you. But I think it will be easier when you see him. Easier to accept him, I mean. He is so undeniably an Ashby, and so very like you.”
“Patrick wasn’t very like me.”
Eleanor saved Bee from having to reply to that. “He was, Simon. Of course he was. He was your twin.”
“If I ran away for years and years, would you believe I was me, Jane?” Ruth asked.
“You wouldn’t stay away for years and years, anyhow,” Jane said.
“What makes you think I wouldn’t?”
“You’d come home in no time at all.”
“Why would I come home?”
“To see how everyone was taking your running away.”
“When is he coming, Aunt Bee?” Eleanor asked.
“On Tuesday. At least that is what we had arranged. But if you would like to put it off a little — until you grow more used to the idea, I mean....” She glanced at Simon, who was looking sick and baffled. In her most apprehensive moments she had never pictured a reaction as serious as this.
“If you flatter yourself that I shall grow used to the idea, you are wrong,” Simon said. “It makes no difference to me when the fellow comes. As far as I’m concerned he is not Patrick and he never will be.”
And he walked out of the room. Walking, Bee noticed, not very steadily, as if he were drunk.
“I’ve never known Simon like that before,” Eleanor said, puzzled.
“I should have broken it to him differently. I’m afraid it is my fault. I just — didn’t want to make him different from anyone else.”
“But he loved Patrick, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t he be glad about it? Even a little glad!”
“I think it is horrid that someone can come and take Simon’s place, without warning, like that,” Jane said. “Simply horrid. And I don’t wonder that Simon is angry.”
“Aunt Bee,” said Ruth, “can I wear my blue on Tuesday when Patrick comes?”
Bee waited till Evensong would be over, and then walked across the fields to the Rectory. Ostensibly, she was going to tell them the news; actually she was going to pour out her troubles to George Peck. When George could withdraw his mind sufficiently from the classic world to focus it on the present one, he was a comfortable person to talk to. Unemotional and unshockable. Bee supposed that an intimate acquaintance with classic on-goings, topped-off with a cure of souls in a country parish, had so conditioned him to shocks that he had long ago become immune from further attack. Neither ancient iniquity nor modern English back-sliding surprised him. So it was not to Nancy, her friend, that she was taking her unquiet heart, but to the Rector. Nancy would wrap her round with warm affection and sympathy, but it was not sympathy she needed; it was support. Besides, if she was to find understanding it would not be with Nancy, who had forgotten Patrick’s very existence, but with George Peck, who would most certainly remember the boy he had taught.
So she walked in the sunlight over the fields, through the churchyard, and into the Rectory garden through the little iron gate that had caused that terrific row in 1723. Very peaceful it all was to-night, and very peaceful were the rival smiths, sleeping within twelve feet of each other over there in the corner in good Clare earth. Some day quite soon, she thought, pausing with her hand on the delicate iron scroll, my trouble too will be just an old song; one must try to keep things in proportion. But it was her head talking to her heart, and her heart would not listen.
She found the Rector where she knew he would be. Always after Evensong it was his habit to go and stare at something in the garden; usually at something at the farther end of the garden from which he could not be too easily recalled to the trivialities of social obligation. This evening he was staring at a purple lilac and polluting the fragrant air with a pipe that smelt like a damp bonfire. “There should be a by-law against pipes like George’s,” his wife had said, and the present sample was no exception. It depressed Bee still further.
He glanced up as she came down the path and went back to staring at the lilac. “Wonderful colour, isn’t it,” he said. “Odd to think that it is just an optical illusion. What colour is a lilac when you are not looking at it, I wonder?”
Bee remembered that the Rector had once broken it to the twins that a clock does not tick if no one is in the room. She had found Ruth being surreptitious in the hall, and Ruth, when asked what this noiseless progress was occasioned by, had said that she was “trying to sneak up on the drawing-room clock.” She wanted to catch it not ticking.
Bee stood by the Rector in silence for a little, looking at the glory and trying to arrange her thoughts. But they would not arrange.
“George,” she said at length, “you remember Patrick, don’t you?”
“Pat Ashby? Of course.” He turned to look at her.
“Well, he didn’t die at all. He just ran away. That is what the note meant. And he is coming back. And Simon isn’t pleased.” A great round shameless tear slipped out of her eye and ran down her cheek. She brushed it off her chin and went on staring at the lilac.
George extended a bony forefinger and gently speared the front of her shoulder with it.
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat down on the seat behind her, under the arch of the young green honeysuckle, and the Rector sat down beside her. “Now, tell me,” he said; and she told him. All the bewildering story, in the proper order and with full detail; Mr. Sandal’s telephone call, the journey to town, the top-floor-back in Pimlico, the investigations of Cosset, Thring and Noble, the rescue by Great-uncle Charles, the ultimate facing of the facts and announcing them to the family, the family reaction.
“Eleanor is a little cold about it, but reasonable as she always is. The thing is there and she is going to make the best of it. Jane, of course, is partisan, and sorry for Simon, but she will get over that when she meets her brother in the flesh. She is a friendly soul by nature.”
“And Ruth?”
“Ruth is planning her wardrobe for Tuesday,” Bee said tartly.
The Rector smiled a little. “The happy ones of the earth, the Ruths.”
“But Simon.... How can one account for Simon?”
“I don’t think that that is very difficult, you know. Simon would have had to be a saint to welcome back a brother who was going to supplant him. A brother, moreover, who has been dead to him since the age of thirteen.”
“But, George, his twin! They were inseparable.”
“I think that thirteen is further removed from twenty-one than almost any other equidistant points in life. It is a whole lifetime away. An association that ended at thirteen has little but sentimental value for the boy of twenty-one. Latchetts has been Simon’s for — what is it? — eight years; he has known for eight years that he would come into his mother’s money at twenty-one: to be deprived of all that without warning would upset a stronger character than Simon’s.”
“I expect I did it badly,” Bee said. “The way I told them, I mean. I should have told Simon first, privately. But I did so want to keep them all on the same level. To pretend that they would all be equally glad. Taking Simon apart and telling him before the others would have — would have ——”
“Anticipated the trouble.”
“Yes. Something like that, I suppose. I suppose I had known quite well that his reaction would be — different from the others. And I just wanted to minimise the difference. I had never imagined for a moment, you see, that his reaction would be so violent. That he would go to the length of denying that Patrick was alive.”
“That is only his method of pushing the unwelcome fact away from him.”
“Unwelcome,” Bee murmured.
“Yes, unwelcome. And very naturally unwelcome. You make things difficult for yourself if you don’t accept that fundamental fact. You remember Patrick with your adult mind, and are rejoiced that he is still alive.” He turned his head to look at her. “Or — are you?”
“Of course I am!” she said, a shade too emphatically. But he let it go.
“Simon doesn’t remember him with an adult mind or adult emotions. To Simon he is a remembered emotion; not a present one. He has no present love to fight his present — hatred with.”
“Oh, George.”
“Yes; it is best to face it. It would take an almost divine love to combat the resentment that Simon must be feeling now; and there has never been anything in the least divine about Simon. Poor Simon. It is a wretched thing to have happened to him.”
“And at the very worst moment. When we were all ready for celebration.”
“At least this is the answer to something that has puzzled me for eight years.”
“What is that?”
“The fact of Patrick’s suicide. I could never reconcile it with the Patrick I knew. Patrick was a sensitive child, but he had a tremendous fund of good common sense; a balance. A far better equilibrium, for instance, than the less sensitive but more brilliant Simon. He had also, moreover, a great sense of obligation. If Latchetts was suddenly and unaccountably his he might be overwhelmed to the point of running away, but not unbalanced to the point of taking his life.”
“Why did we all so unquestioningly accept the suicide theory?”
“The coat on the cliff-top. The note — which did read like a suicide one, undoubtedly. The complete lack of anyone who had seen him after old Abel met him between Tanbitches and the cliff. The persistence with which suicides use that particular part of the coast for their taking-off. It was the natural conclusion to come to. I don’t remember that we ever questioned it. But it had always stayed in my mind as an unaccountable thing. Not the method, but the fact that Patrick should have taken his own life. It was unlike everything I knew about Patrick. And now we find that, after all, he did no such thing.”
“I shut my eyes and the lilac is no colour; I open them and it is purple,” Bee was saying to herself; which was her way of keeping her tears at bay. Just as she counted objects when in danger of crying at a play.
“Tell me, are you pleased with this adult Patrick who has come back?”
“Yes. Yes, I am pleased. He is in some ways very like the Patrick who went away. Very quiet. Self-contained. Very considerate. Do you remember how Patrick used to turn and say: ‘Are you all right?’ before he began whatever he was planning to do on his own? He still thinks of the other person. Didn’t try to — rush me, or take his welcome for granted. And he still keeps his bad times to himself. Simon always came flying to one with his griefs and grievances, but Patrick dealt with his own. He seems still to be able to deal with his own.”
“Has he had a bad time, then, do you think?”
“I gather it hasn’t been a bed of roses. I forgot to tell you that he is lame.”
“Lame!”
“Yes. Just a little. Some accident with a horse. He is still mad about horses.”
“That will make you happy,” George said. He said it a little wryly, being no horseman.
“Yes,” agreed Bee with a faint smile for the wryness. “It is good that Latchetts should go to a real lover.”
“You rate Simon as a poor lover?”
“Not poor. Indifferent, perhaps. To Simon horses are a means of providing excitement. Of enhancing his prestige. A medium for trade; for profitable dickering. I doubt if it goes further than that. For horses as — people, if you know what I mean, he has little feeling. Their sicknesses bore him. Eleanor will stay up for nights on end with a horse that is ill, sharing the nursing fifty-fifty with Gregg. The only time Simon loses sleep is when a horse he wants to ride, or jump, or hunt, has a ‘leg’.”
“Poor Simon,” the Rector said reflectively. “Not the temperament to make a successful fight against jealousy. A very destructive emotion indeed, jealousy.”
Before Bee could answer, Nancy appeared.
“Bee! How nice,” she said. “Were you at Evensong, and did you see the latest contingent from our local school for scandalisers? Two adolescents who are ‘studying the prevalent English superstitions’: to wit, the Church of England. A boy, very hairy for fourteen, it seemed to me; and a girl with eleven combs keeping up her not very abundant wisps. What would you say a passion for combs was an indication of? A sense of insecurity?”
“Beatrice has come with a very wonderful piece of news,” the Rector said.
“Don’t tell me Simon has got himself engaged.”
“No. It is not about Simon. It’s about Patrick.”
“Patrick?” Nancy said uncertainly.
“He is alive.” And he told her how.
“Oh, Bee, my dear,” Nancy said, putting her arms round her friend, “how glorious for you. Now you won’t have to wonder any more.”
That Nancy’s first reaction was to remember that private nightmare of hers broke Bee down altogether.
“You need a drink,” Nancy said, briskly. “Come along in and we’ll finish what’s left in the sherry bottle.”
“A deplorable reason for drinking sherry,” the Rector said.
“What is?”
“That one ‘needs a drink’.”
“An even more deplorable reason is that if we don’t drink it Mrs. Godkin will. She has had most of the rest of the bottle. Come along.”
So Bee drank the Rectory sherry and listened while George enlightened Nancy on the details of Patrick Ashby’s return. Now that her weight of knowledge was shared with her own generation, the burden was suddenly lighter. Whatever difficulties lay ahead, there Would be George and Nancy to support and comfort her.
“When is Patrick coming?” Nancy asked; and the Rector turned to Bee.
“On Tuesday,” Bee told them. “What I can’t decide is the best way of spreading the news in the district.”
“That’s easy,” Nancy said. “Just tell Mrs. Gloom.”
Mrs. Gloom kept the sweets-tobacco-and-newspaper shop in the village. Her real name was Bloom, but her relish for disaster caused her to be known, first by the Ledingham and Ashby children, and later by all and sundry, as Mrs. Gloom.
“Or you could send yourself a postcard. The post office is almost as good. That is what Jim Bowden did when he jilted the Heywood girl. Sent his mother a telegram announcing his wedding. The fuss was all over before he came back.”
“I’m afraid we are going to be at the exact centre of the fuss until the nine days’ wonder is over,” Bee said. “One must just put up with it.”
“Ah, well, my dear, it’s a nice sort of fuss,” Nancy said, comforting.
“Yes. But the situation is so — so incalculable. It’s like — like ——”
“I know,” Nancy said, agreeing. “Like walking on jelly.”
“I was going to say picking one’s way over a bog, but I think the jelly is a better description.”
“Or one of those uneven floors at fun fairs,” the Rector said unexpectedly, as Bee took her leave.
“How do you know about fun fairs, George?” his wife asked.
“They had one at the Westover Carnival a year or two ago, I seem to remember. A most interesting study in masochism.”
“You see now why I have stuck to George,” Nancy said, as she walked with Bee to the garden gate. “After thirteen years I am still finding out things about him. I wouldn’t have believed that he even knew what a fun fair was. Can you picture George lost in contemplation of the Giant Racer?”
But it was not of Nancy’s George that she was thinking as she walked away through the churchyard, but of the fun-fair floor that she was doomed to walk in the days ahead. She turned in at the south porch of the church and found the great oak door still unlocked. The light of the sunset flooded the grey vault with warmth, and the whole building held peace as a cup holds water. She sat down on a bench by the door and listened to the silence. A companionable silence which she shared with the figures on the tombs, the tattered banners, the names on the wall, the Legion’s garish Union Jack, and the slow ticking of a clock. The tombs were all Ledingham ones: from the simple dignity of the Crusader to the marble family that wept with ostentatious opulence over the eighteenth-century politician. The Ashbys had no crusaders and no opulence. Their memorials were tablets on the wall. Bee sat there and read them for the thousandth time. “Of Latchetts” was the refrain. “Of Latchetts in this parish.” No field-marshals, no chancellors, no poets, no reformers. Just the yeoman simplicity of Latchetts; the small-squire sufficiency of Latchetts.
And now Latchetts belonged to this unknown boy from half a world away.
“A great sense of obligation,” the Rector had said, speaking of the Patrick he remembered. And that had been the Patrick that she, too, remembered. And that Patrick would have written to them.
Always she came back to that in her mind. The Patrick they knew would never have left them in grief and doubt for eight years.
“Some psychological difficulty,” Mr. Sandal had said. And after all, he had run away. A sufficiently unlikely thing for Patrick to do. Perhaps he had been overcome by shame when he came to himself.
And yet. And yet.
That kind child who so automatically asked: “Are you all right?”
That child with the “great sense of obligation”?
And while Bee sat and stared at the Ashby tablets in the church at Clare, Brat Farrar was standing in the back room in Pimlico in a brand-new suit and a state of panic.
How had he got himself into this? What could he have been thinking of? He, Brat Farrar. How did he ever think that he could go through with it? How had he ever in the first place consented to lend himself to such a plan?
It was the suit that had shocked him into realisation. The suit was wrong-doing made concrete and manifest. It was a wonderful suit. The kind of suit that he had dreamed of possessing; so unremarkable, so unmistakable once you had remarked it: English tailoring at its unobtrusive best. But he stood looking at himself in the mirror in a kind of horror.
He couldn’t do it, that was all. He just couldn’t do it.
He would duck, before it was too late.
He would send back the goddamned suit to the tailor, and send a letter to that woman who had been so nice, and just duck out of sight.
“What!” said the voice. “And pass up the greatest adventure of your life? The greatest adventure that has happened to any man within living memory?”
“Adventure my foot. It’s plain false pretences.”
They wouldn’t bother to look for him. They would be too relieved to have him out of their hair. He could duck without leaving a ripple.
“And leave a fortune behind?” said the voice.
“Yes, and leave a fortune behind. Who wants a fortune, anyhow?”
They would have his letter to insure them against any further nuisance from his side, and they would just let him go. He would write to that woman who, because she was kind, had kissed him before she was sure, and confess, and say he was sorry, and that would be that.
“And pass up the chance of owning a stud?”
“Who wants a stud? The world’s lousy with horses.”
“And you are going to own some, perhaps?”
“I may, some day. I may.”
“Pigs may fly.”
“Shut up.”
He would write to Loding and tell him that he would be no party to his criminal schemes.
“And waste all that knowledge? All that training?”
“I should never have started it.”
“But you did start it. You finished it. You are primed to the gills with knowledge worth a fortune. You can’t waste it, surely!”
Loding would have to whistle for that fifty per cent. How could he ever have thought of letting himself be an instrument in the hands of a crook like Loding!
“A very amusing and intelligent crook. On the highest level of crookery. Nothing to be ashamed of, believe me.”
He would go to a travel agency to-morrow morning and get a berth out of the country. Anywhere out of the country.
“I thought you wanted to stay in England?”
He would put the sea between him and temptation.
“Did you say temptation? Don’t tell me that you’re still wavering!”
He hadn’t enough left for a fare to America, but he had enough to take him quite a distance. The travel agency would offer him a choice of places. The world was wide and there was a lot of fun left in it. By Tuesday morning he would be out of England, and this time he would stay out.
“And never see Latchetts at all?”
He would find some —— “What did you say?”
“I said: And never see Latchetts at all?”
He tried to think of an answer.
“Stumped you, haven’t I!”
There must be an answer.
“Money, and horses, and fun, and adventure are common change. You can have them anywhere in the world. But if you pass up Latchetts now you pass it up for good. There won’t be any going back.”
“But what has Latchetts to do with me?”
“You ask that? You, with your Ashby face, and your Ashby bones, and your Ashby tastes, and your Ashby colouring, and your Ashby blood.”
“I haven’t any evidence at all that ——”
“And your Ashby blood, I said. Why, you poor little brute of a foundling, Latchetts is your belonging-place, and you have the immortal gall to pretend that you don’t care a rap about it!”
“I didn’t say I didn’t care. Of course I care.”
“But you’ll walk out of this country to-morrow, and leave Latchetts behind? For always? Because that is what it amounts to, my boy. That is the choice before you. Take the road of high adventure and on Tuesday morning you will see Latchetts. Duck, and you will never see it at all.”
“But I’m not a crook! I can’t do something that is criminal.”
“Can’t you? You’ve been giving a pretty good imitation of it these last few weeks. And enjoying it too. Remember how you enjoyed that tight-rope business on that first visit to old Sandal? How you enjoyed all the others? Even with a K.C. sitting across the table and doing a sort of mental X-ray on you. You loved it. All that is wrong with you just now is cold feet. Nerves. You want to see Latchetts as you have never wanted anything before. You want to live at Latchetts as an Ashby. You want horses. You want adventure. You want a life in England. Go to Latchetts on Tuesday and they are all yours.”
“But ——”
“You came half across the world to that meeting with Loding. Was that just chance? Of course not. It was all meant. Your destiny is at Latchetts. Your destiny. What you were born for. Your destiny. At Latchetts. You’re an Ashby. Half across a world to a place you never heard of. Destiny. You can’t pass up destiny....”
Brat got slowly out of the brand-new suit, and hung it up with orphanage neatness on its fine new hanger. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed and buried his face in his hands.
He was still sitting there when the darkness came.
It was a beautiful day, the day that Brat Farrar came to Latchetts, but a restless little wind kept turning the leaves over so that in spite of the sunlight and the bright air the world was filled with a vague unease and a promise of storm.
“Much too shiny!” thought Bee, looking at the landscape from her bedroom window after breakfast. “‘Tears before night,’ as Nanny used to say of too exuberant children. However. At least he will arrive in sunshine.”
She had been greatly exercised in her mind over that arrival. It was to be as informal as possible; that was a thing that was agreed to by all concerned. Someone would meet him at the station and bring him home, and there would be luncheon with only the family present. The question was: Who was to meet him? The twins had held that the whole family should go to the station, but that, of course, was not to be thought of. The prodigal could hardly be welcomed publicly on the platform at Guessgate for the entertainment of the railway staff and casual travellers between Westover and Bures. She herself could not go without giving the returning Patrick an air of being her protégé; which was something to be avoided at all costs. She had not forgotten Simon’s sneer about her “adoption” of Patrick. Simon — the obvious choice for the role of welcomer — was not available; since her announcement on Sunday he had slept at home but had not otherwise taken part in Latchetts activities, and Bee’s attempt to talk to him in his room late on Monday night had been futile.
So she had been relieved when Eleanor offered to drive the four miles to the station at Guessgate and bring Patrick back.
The present load on her mind was that family meal after his arrival. If Simon did not turn up how was his absence to be explained? And if he did turn up what was that lunch going to be like?
She turned to go down for one more rehearsal with the cook — their third cook in the last twelve months — when she was waylaid by Lana, their “help.” Lana came from the village, and had gilt hair and varnished fingernails and the local version of the current make-up. She “obliged” only because her “boy-friend” worked in the stables. She would sweep and dust, she explained when she first came, because that was “all right,” but she would not wait at table because that was “menial.” Bee had longed to tell her that no one with her hands, or her breath, or her scent, or her manners, would ever be allowed to hand an Ashby a plate; but she had learned to be politic. She explained that there was, in any case, no question of waiting at table; the Ashbys always waited on themselves.
Lana had come to say that the “vacuum was vomiting instead of swallowing,” and domestic worries closed once more over Bee’s head and swamped domestic drama. She came to the surface in time to see Eleanor getting into her little two-seater.
“Aren’t you taking the car?” she asked. “The car” was the family vehicle, Eleanor’s disreputable little conveyance being known as “the bug.”
“No. He’ll have to take us as we are,” Eleanor said.
Bee noticed that she had not bothered to change into a dress. She was wearing the breeches and gaiters in which she had begun the morning.
“Oh, take me, take me!” Ruth said, precipitating herself down the steps and on to the car, but taking good care, Bee noticed, to keep “her blue” away from the bug’s dusty metal.
“No,” Eleanor said firmly.
“I’m sure he would like me to be there. One of my generation, I mean. After all, he knows you. It won’t be exciting for him to see you the way it would be for him to see ——”
“No. And keep off if you don’t want that dazzling outfit of yours to be mucked up.”
“I do think it is selfish of Eleanor,” Ruth said, dusting her palms as she watched the car grow small between the lime trees. “She just wants to keep the excitement to herself.”
“Nonsense. It was arranged that you and Jane should wait here. Where is Jane, by the way?”
“In the stables, I think. She isn’t interested in Patrick.”
“I hope she comes in in good time for lunch.”
“Oh, she will. She may not be interested in Patrick, but she is always ready for her meals. Is Simon going to be there, at lunch?”
“I hope so.”
“What do you think he will say to Patrick?”
If the peace and happiness of Latchetts was going to break down into a welter of discord the twins must go away to school. They would be going to school in a year or two, anyhow; they had much better go now than live in an atmosphere of strain and hatred.
“Do you think there will be a scene?” Ruth asked, hopefully.
“Of course not, Ruth. I wish you wouldn’t dramatise things.”
But she wished, too, that she could count on there being no scene. And Eleanor, on her way to the station, was wishing the same thing. She was a little nervous of meeting this new brother, and annoyed with herself for being nervous. Her everyday clothes were her protest against her own excitement: a pretence that nothing of real moment was about to happen.
Guessgate, which served three villages but no town, was a small wayside station with a fairly heavy goods business but little passenger traffic, so that when Brat climbed down from his carriage there was no one on the platform but a fat countrywoman, a sweating porter, the ticket-collector, and Eleanor.
“Hullo,” she said. “You are very like Simon.” And she shook hands with him. He noticed that she wore no make-up. A little powdering of freckles went over the bridge of her nose.
“Eleanor,” he said, identifying her.
“Yes. What about your luggage? I have just the small car but the dickey holds quite a lot.”
“I have just this,” he said, indicating his “grip.”
“Is the rest coming later?”
“No, this is all I possess.”
“Oh.” She smiled just a little. “No moss.”
“No,” he said, “no moss,” and began to like her very much.
“The car is out in the yard. Through this way.”
“Been away, Mr. Ashby?” the ticket-collector said, accepting his piece of pasteboard.
“Yes, I’ve been away.”
At the sound of his voice the ticket-collector looked up, puzzled.
“He took you for Simon,” Eleanor said, as they got into the car; and smiled properly. Her two front teeth crossed just a little; which gave her face an endearing childishness. It was a cool, determined, small face when she was serious. “You couldn’t have come home at a better time of the year,” she said, as they scrunched over the gravel of the station yard and fled away into the landscape.
“Home,” he thought. Her hair was the colour of corn so ripe that it was nearly white. Pale, silky stuff, very fine. It was brushed back into a knot, as if she could not be bothered to do anything else with it.
“The blossom is just beginning. And the first foals are here.”
The knees in their worn whipcord were just like a boy’s. But the bare arms protruding from the jacket she wore slung over her shoulders were delicately round.
“Honey has a filly foal that is going to make history. Wait till you see it. You won’t know Honey, of course. She was after your time. Her real name is Greek Honey. By Hymettus out of a mare called Money For Jam. I hope you will be impressed with our horses.”
“I expect to be,” he said.
“Aunt Bee says that you’re still interested in them. Horses, I mean.”
“I haven’t done much on the breeding side, of course. Just preparing horses for work.”
They came to the village.
So this was Clare. This warm, living, smiling entity was what those little flat squares on the map had stood for. There was the White Hart; there was the Bell. And up there behind, on its knoll, was the church where the Ashby tablets hung.
“The village is looking nice, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “Not changed a bit since I can remember. Not changed since the Flood, if it comes to that. The names of the people in the houses come in the same order down the street as they did in the time of Richard the Second. But of course you know that! I keep thinking of you as a visitor.”
Beyond the village, he knew, were the great gates of Clare Park. He waited, mildly curious, to see the entrance to what had been Alec Loding’s home. It proved to be a sweeping curve of iron lace flanked by two enormous pillars bearing on each a lion passant. Astride the farther lion was a small boy clad in a leopard-skin rug with green baize edging, a seaside pail worn helmet-wise, and nothing else that was visible. A very long brass poker stood up lance-wise from its rest on his bare foot.
“It’s all right,” Eleanor said. “You did see it.”
“That comforts me quite a bit.”
“Did you know that Clare was a school nowadays?”
He had nearly said yes, when he remembered that this was merely one of the things Loding had told him, not one of the things that he was supposed to know.
“What kind of school?”
“A school for dodgers.”
“Dodgers?”
“Yes. Anyone who loathes hard work and has a parent with enough money to pay the fees makes a bee-line for Clare. No one is forced to learn anything at Clare. Not even the multiplication table. The theory is that one day you’ll feel the need of the multiplication table and be seized with a mad desire to acquire the nine-times. Of course, it doesn’t work out like that at all.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Of course not. No one who could get out of the nine-times would ever dream of acquiring it voluntarily.”
“And if they don’t do lessons what do they do all day?”
“Express their personalities. They draw things; or make things; or whitewash the coach-house; or dress up, like Antony Toselli. That was Tony on the lion. I teach some of them to ride. They like that. Riding, I mean. I think they are so bored with easy things that they find something a little difficult simply fascinating. But of course it has to be something out of the ordinary. The difficult thing, I mean. If it was a difficulty that everyone was supposed to overcome they wouldn’t be interested. That would bring them down to the common level of you and me. They wouldn’t be ‘different’ any longer.”
“Nice people.”
“Very profitable to Latchetts, anyhow. And here is Latchetts.”
Brat’s heart rose up into his throat. Eleanor turned slowly into the white gateway between the limes.
It was just as well that she was going slowly, for she had no sooner entered the green tunnel than something like a giant blue butterfly shot out from the boles of the trees and danced wildly in front of the car.
Eleanor braked and swore simultaneously.
“Hullo! Hullo!” shouted the butterfly, dancing to Brat’s side of the car.
“You little idiot,” Eleanor said. “You deserve to be killed. Don’t you know that a driver doesn’t see well coming into the avenue out of the sunlight?”
“Hullo! Hullo, Patrick! It’s me! Ruth. How d’you do. I came to ride up with you. To the house, you know. Can I sit on your knee? There isn’t very much room in that awful old car of Eleanor’s, and I don’t want to crush my dress. I hope you like my dress. It is put on specially for your coming home. You’re very good-looking, aren’t you? Am I what you expected?”
She waited for an answer to that, so Brat said that he hadn’t really thought about it.
“Oh,” said Ruth, much dashed. “We thought about you,” she said reprovingly. “No one has talked about anything else for days.”
“Ah well,” Brat said, “when you have run away for years and years people will talk about you.”
“I shouldn’t dream of doing anything so outré,” Ruth said, unforgiving.
“Where did you get that word?” Eleanor asked.
“It’s a very good word. Mrs. Peck uses it.”
Brat felt that he ought to paint in a little local colour by saying: “How are the Pecks, by the way?” But he had no mind to spare for artifice. He was waiting for the moment when the limes would thin out and he would see Latchetts.
For the moment when he would be face to face with his “twin.”
“Simon hasn’t come back yet,” he heard Ruth say; and saw her sideways glance at Eleanor. The glance, even more than the information, shook him.
So Simon wasn’t waiting on the doorstep for him. Simon was “away” somewhere and the family was uneasy about it.
Alec Loding had disabused him of the idea that a feudal staff reception would await him at Latchetts; that there would be a line of servants, headed by the butler and descending in strict order to the latest tweeny, to welcome the Young Master to the ancestral home. That, Loding had said, had gone out with bustles, and Latchetts had never had a butler, anyhow. And he had known, too, that there would be no array of relations. The children’s father had been an only son with one sister, Aunt Bee. The children’s mother had been an only daughter with two brothers: both of them killed by the Germans before they were twenty. The only near Ashby relation was Great-uncle Charles, reported by Loding to be now nearing Singapore.
But it had not occurred to him that all the available Ashbys might not be there. That there might be dissenters. The ease of his meeting with Eleanor had fooled him. Metaphorically speaking, he picked up the reins that had been lying on his neck.
The car ran out of the thin spring green of the avenue into the wide sweep in front of the house, and there in the too-bright gusty sunlight stood Latchetts; very quiet, very friendly, very sure of itself. The gabled front of the original building had been altered by some eighteenth-century Ashby to conform with the times, so that only the tiled roof showed its age and origin. Built in the last days of Elizabeth, it was now blandly “Queen Anne.” It stood there in its grasslands, undecorated and sufficient; needing no garden for its enhancement. The green of the small park flowered at its heart into the house itself, and any other flowering would have been redundant.
As Eleanor swept round towards the house, Brat saw Beatrice Ashby come out on to the doorstep, and a sudden panic seized him; a mad desire to blurt out the truth to her and back out there and then; before he had put foot over the doorstep; before he was definitely “on” in the scene. It was going to be a damnably difficult and awkward scene and he had no idea how to play it.
It was Ruth who saved him from the worst moment of awkwardness. Before the car had come to a halt she was piping her triumph to the world, so that Brat’s arrival somehow took second place to her own achievement.
“I met him after all, Aunt Bee! I met him after all. I came up from the gate with them. You don’t mind, do you? I just strolled down as far as the gate and when I got there I saw them coming, and they stopped and gave me a lift and here we are and so I met him after all.”
She linked her arm through Brat’s and tumbled with him out of the car, dragging him behind her as if he were a find of her own. So that it was with a mutual shrug for this display of personality that Brat and Bee greeted each other. They were united for the moment in a rueful amusement, and by the time the amusement had passed so had the moment.
Before awkwardness could come flooding back, there was a second distraction. Jane came riding round the corner of the house on Fourposter on her way to the stables. The instant check of her hands on the reins when she saw the group at the door made it obvious that she had not planned on being one of that group. But it was too late now to back out, even if backing out had been possible. It was never possible to back away from anything that Fourposter might happen to be interested in; he had no mouth and an insatiable curiosity. So forward came the reluctant Jane on a highly interested pony. As Fourposter came to a halt she slid politely to the ground and stood there shy and defensive. When Bee introduced her she laid a small limp hand in Brat’s and after a moment withdrew it.
“What is your pony’s name?” Brat asked, aware of her antagonism.
“That’s Fourposter,” Ruth said, appropriating Jane’s mount. “The Rector calls him the Equine Omnibus.”
Brat put out his hand to the pony, who refused the advance by withdrawing a pace and looking contemptuously down his Roman nose. As a gesture it was pure burlesque; a Victorian gesture of repudiation from a Victorian drama.
“A comedian,” remarked Brat; and Bee, delighted with his perception, laughed.
“He doesn’t like people,” Jane said, half-repressive, half-defending her friend.
But Brat kept his hand out, and presently Fourposter’s curiosity overcame his stand-offishness and he dropped his head to the waiting hand. Brat made much of him, till Fourposter capitulated entirely and nuzzled him with elephantine playfulness.
“Well!” said Ruth, watching. “He never does that to anyone!”
Brat looked down into the small tight face by his elbow, at the small grubby hands clutching the reins so tightly.
“I expect he does to Jane when no one is around,” he said.
“Jane, it is time you were cleaned up for lunch,” Bee said, and turned to lead the way indoors.
And Brat followed her, over the threshold.
“I have put you in the old night nursery,” Bee said. “I hope you don’t mind. Simon has the room that he used to share with — that you used to share with him.” Oh, dear, what a gaffe, she thought; shall I ever be able to think of him as Patrick? “And to give you one of the spare rooms was to treat you like a visitor.”
Brat said that he would be glad to have the night nursery.
“Will you go up now, or will you have a drink first?”
“I’ll go up now,” Brat said, and turned to the stairway.
He knew that she had been waiting for this moment; waiting for the moment when he must show knowledge of the house. So he turned from her and led the way upstairs; up to the big first landing and down the narrow corridor to the north wing, and to the children’s rooms facing west from it. He opened the third of the four doors and stood in the room that Nora Ashby had arranged for her children when they were small. One window looked west over the paddocks and the other north to the rise of the down. It was on the quiet side of the house, away from the stables and the approach from the road. He stood at the window looking at the soft blue English distances, thinking of the brilliant mountains beyond the whirling dust of the West, and very conscious of Bee Ashby behind him.
There was something else that he must take the initiative about.
“Where is Simon?” he said, and turned to face her.
“He is like Jane,” she said. “Late for lunch. But he’ll be in at any moment.”
It was smoothly done, but he had seen her shy at his unheralded question, as if he had flicked a whip. Simon had not come to meet him; Simon had not been at Latchetts to greet him; Simon, it was to be deduced, was being difficult.
Before he could pursue the subject she took the initiative from him.
“You can have the nursery bathroom all to yourself, but do go slow on the hot water, will you? Fuel is a dreadful problem. Now wash and come down at once. The Pecks sent over some of the Rectory sherry.”
“Aren’t they coming to lunch?”
“No, they’re coming to dinner to-night. Lunch is for family only.”
She watched him turn to the fourth door, which he knew to be the bathroom of the nursery wing, and went away looking comforted. He knew why she was comforted: because he had known his way about the house. And he felt guilty and ill at ease. Fooling Mr. Sandal — with a K.C. sitting opposite you and gimletting holes in you with cynical Irish eyes — had been one thing; fooling Mr. Sandal had been fun. But fooling Bee Ashby was another thing altogether.
He washed absentmindedly, turning the soap in his hands with his eyes on the line of the down. There was the turf he had wanted to ride on; the turf he had sold his soul for. Presently he would get a horse and go up there and ride in the quiet, away from human relationships and this fantastic game of human poker, and up there it would once more seem right and worth while.
He went back to his room and found a brassy blonde in tight flowered rayon tweaking the wallflower in the bowl on the window-sill.
“Hullo,” said the blonde. “Welcome home, and all that.”
“Thanks,” Brat said. Was this someone that he should know? Surely not!
“You’re very like your brother, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so.” He took his brushes from his “grip” and put them on the dressing-table; it was a symbolical taking-possession.
“You won’t know me, of course. I’m Lana Adams from the village. Adams the joiner was my father. I oblige because my boy-friend works in the stables.”
So that is what she was: the help. He looked at her and was sorry for the boy-friend.
“You look a lot older than your brother, don’t you? I suppose it’s knocking about the world that does it. Having to look out for yourself, and all that. Not being spoilt like your brother. You’ll excuse me saying it but spoilt he is. That’s why he’s made all this to-do about you coming back. Silly, I call it. You’ve only to look at you to know that you’re an Ashby. Not much point in saying you’re not, I should think. But you take my tip and stand up to him. He can’t stand being stood up to. Been humoured all his life, I should say. Don’t let it get you down.”
As Brat went silently on with his unpacking, she paused; and before she could resume Eleanor’s cool voice said from the doorway:
“Have you everything you want?”
The blonde said hastily: “I was just welcoming Mr. Patrick back,” and, having flung Brat a radiant smile, made a hip-swing exit from the room.
Brat wondered how much Eleanor had heard.
“It’s a nice room this,” Eleanor said, “except that it doesn’t get the morning sun. That bed is from Clare Park. Aunt Bee sold the little ones and bought that one at the Clare sale. It’s nice, isn’t it? It was the one in Alec Ledingham’s room. Except for that the room is just the same.”
“Yes; the old wallpaper, I notice.”
“Robinson Crusoe and company. Yes. I had a great weakness for Hereward the Wake. He had such an enchanting profile.” She pointed to Hereward’s place in the pattern of fictional heroes that Nora had chosen for her children’s nightly entertainment.
“Is the nursery-rhyme paper still next door?”
“Yes, of course. Come and see.”
He went with her, but while she rehearsed the pictured tales his mind was busy with the village girl’s revelation about Simon and with the ironic fact that he was to sleep in Alec Loding’s bed.
So Simon had refused to believe that he was Patrick. “Not much point in saying you’re not, I should think.” That could only mean that Simon, in the face of all the evidence, refused to accept him.
Why?
He followed Eleanor downstairs, still wondering.
Eleanor led him into a big sunny sitting-room where Bee was pouring sherry, and Ruth was picking out a tune on a piano.
“Would you like to hear me play?” Ruth asked, inevitably.
“No,” Eleanor said, “he wouldn’t. We’ve been looking at the old wallpapers,” she said to Bee. “I’d forgotten how in love with Hereward I used to be. It’s just as well that I was removed from him in time or he might have become a fixation or something.”
“I never liked that baby stuff on the walls,” Ruth said.
“You never read, so you couldn’t know anything about them,” Eleanor said.
“We gave up using the nursery wing when the twins ceased to have a Nanny,” Bee said. “It was too far away from the rest of the house.”
“It was a day’s march to call the twins in the morning,” Eleanor said, “and as Ruth always needed calling several times we had to move them into the normal family orbit.”
“Delicate people need more sleep,” Ruth said.
“Since when have you been delicate?” asked Eleanor.
“It’s not that I’m delicate but that Jane’s more robust, aren’t you, Jane?” she said, appealing to Jane, who sidled into the room, the hair at her temples still damp from her hasty ablutions.
But Jane’s eyes were on Bee.
“Simon is here,” she said in a small voice; and crossed the room to stand near Bee as if for reassurance.
There was an instant of complete silence. In the moment of suspended animation only Ruth moved. Ruth sat up and sparkled with anticipation.
Then Bee’s hand moved again and went on filling the glasses. “That is very nice,” she said. “We needn’t keep luncheon back after all.”
It was so beautifully done that Brat, knowing what he knew now, felt like applauding.
“Where is Simon?” Eleanor asked casually.
“He was coming downstairs,” Jane said; and her eyes went back to Bee.
The door opened and Simon Ashby came in.
He paused a moment, looking across at Brat, before closing the door behind him. “So you’ve come,” he said.
There was no emphasis on the words; no apparent emotion in the tone.
He walked slowly across the room until he was standing face to face with Brat by the window. He had abnormally clear grey eyes with a darker rim to the iris, but they had no expression in them. Nor had his pale features any expression. He was so tightly strung, Brat thought, that if you plucked him with a finger he would twang.
And then quite suddenly the tightness went.
He stood for a moment searching Brat’s face; and his own was suddenly slack with relief.
“They won’t have told you?” he said, drawling a little, “but I was prepared to deny with my last breath that you were Patrick. Now that I’ve seen you I take all that back. Of course you are Patrick.” He put out his hand. “Welcome home.”
The stillness behind them broke in a flurry of movement and competing voices. There was a babble of mutual congratulation, of chinking glasses and laughter. Even Ruth, it seemed, stifled her disappointment at being done out of melodrama, and devoted her talents to wheedling a little more sherry into her glass than the “sip” that was the twins’ allowance for health-drinking.
But Brat, drinking the golden liquid and thanking heaven that the moment was over, was puzzled. Why relief? he was thinking.
What had Ashby expected? What had he been afraid of?
He had denied the possibility of Brat’s being Patrick. Had that been just a defence against hope; an insurance against ultimate disappointment? Had he said to himself: I won’t believe that Patrick is alive, and so when it is proved that he isn’t I won’t have hoped for nothing? And was that overwhelming relief a moment ago due merely to the realisation that he was after all Patrick?
It didn’t fit.
He watched Simon being the life of the party, and wondered about him. A few moments ago Ashby had been steeled to face something, and now it seemed he had been — let off. That was it. That was what that sudden relief had been. The reaction of someone steeled to face the worst and suddenly reprieved.
Why should he feel reprieved?
He took the small puzzle into luncheon with him, and it lay at the back of his mind while he dealt with the problems of Ashby conversation and answered their crowding questions.
“You’re in!” gloated the voice inside him. “You’re in! You’re sitting as of right at the Ashby table, and they’re all tickled to death about it.”
Well, perhaps not all. Jane, loyal to Simon, was a small silent oasis in the right talk. And it was not to be expected that Simon himself, for all his capitulation, was tickled to any great extent. But Bee, entirely uncritical of that capitulation, was radiant: and Eleanor melted moment by moment from conversational politeness to a frank interest.
“But a Comanche bridle is a kind of twitch, isn’t it?”
“No; just a gag. The rope goes through the mouth the way a bit does. It’s best for a led horse. He’ll follow to lessen the pull.”
Ruth, having quite forgiven his lack of speculation about her looks, paid assiduous court to him; and she was the only one who called him Patrick.
This became more noticeable as the meal went on, and her continual interjection of “Patrick!” as she claimed his attention contrasted with the others’ half-conscious avoidance of the name. Brat wished that his sole “follower” had proved to be Jane and not Ruth. If he had ever had a small sister he would have liked her to be just like Jane. It annoyed him that he had difficulty in meeting Jane’s eyes. It cost him the same effort to meet her regard with equanimity as it did to meet the eyes of the portrait behind her. The dining-room was positively papered with portraits, and the one behind Jane was of William Ashby the Seventh, wearing the uniform of the Westover Fencibles, in which he had proposed to resist the invasion of Napoleon the First. Brat had learned those portraits off by heart, sitting under the pagoda in Kew Gardens, and every time he lifted his eyes to those of William Ashby the Seventh he was plagued by the ridiculous notion that William knew all about the pagoda.
One thing helped him enormously, however, in this first difficult meeting with the Ashbys. The tale he had to tell, as Loding had pointed out during that meal at the Green Man, was, except for its beginnings, true; it was the tale of his own life. And since the whole family with one accord avoided any reference to the events which had catapulted him into that life, the conversational ground he moved on was firm. There was need for neither side-stepping nor manoeuvre.
Nor was there any need for him to “mind his manners”; and for that too Alec Loding had given loud thanks. It seemed that, short of a first-class and very strict Nanny, there was no more rigorous training in the civilised consumption of food than was to be had at a first-class orphanage. “My God,” Loding had said, “if I ever have any change from a round of drinks I’ll send it to that caravanserai of yours, as a mark of my gratitude that you were not brought up in some genteel suburb. Gentility is practically ineradicable, my boy. And whatever Pat Ashby might conceivably do, it is quite inconceivable that he should ever stick out his little finger when he drank.”
So Brat had no social habits to unlearn. Indeed, his orthodoxy slightly disappointed Ruth, always on the lookout for the flamboyant.
“You don’t eat with your fork,” she said; and when he looked puzzled, added: “The way they do in American pictures; they cut things up with their knives and forks and then they change the fork over to their other hand and eat with it.”
“I don’t chew gum either,” he pointed out.
“I wonder how that very elaborate method of dealing with their food arose,” Bee said.
“Perhaps knives were scarce in the early days,” Eleanor suggested.
“Knives were far too useful to be scarce in a pioneer society,” Simon said. “It’s much more likely that they lived so long on hash that when they got things in slices their instinct was to make hash of it as soon as possible.”
Brat thought, listening to them, how very English it all was. Here he was, back from the dead, and they were calmly discussing American table manners. There was no backslapping, congratulatory insistence on the situation as there would be in a transatlantic household. They avoided the do-you-remember theme as determinedly as Americans would have wallowed in it. Remembering his friends of the Lazy Y, he thought what a fine exhibition of Limey snootiness this would be from the point of view of Pete, and Hank, and Lefty.
But perhaps the happiness on Bee’s face would have impressed even Lefty.
“Do you smoke?” Bee asked, when she had poured the coffee; and she pushed the cigarette box over to him. But Brat, who liked his own brand, took out his case and offered the contents to her.
“I’ve given them up,” Bee said. “I have a bank balance instead.”
So Brat offered the case to Eleanor.
Eleanor paused with her fingers touching the cigarettes, and bent forward to read something engraved on the inside of the case.
“Brat Farrar,” she said. “Who is that?”
“Me,” said Brat.
“You? Oh, yes; Farrar, of course. But why Brat?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they call you that? Brat, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why Brat?”
“I don’t know. Because I was small, I guess.”
“Brat!” Ruth said delighted. “Do you mind if I call you Brat? Do you?”
“No. I haven’t been called anything else for a large part of my life.”
The door opened and Lana appeared to say that a young man had called to see Miss Ashby and she had put him in the library.
“Oh, what a nuisance,” Bee said. “What does he want, do you know?”
“He says he’s a reporter,” Lana said, “but he doesn’t look like a reporter to me. Quite tidy and clean and polite.” Lana’s experience of the Press, like Brat’s knowledge of middle-class life, was derived solely from films.
“Oh, no!” Bee said. “Not the Press. Not already.”
“The Westover Times he says he is.”
“Did he say why he had come?”
“Come about Mr. Patrick, of course,” Lana said, turning her thumb in Patrick’s direction.
“Oh, God,” Simon groaned, “and the fatted calf not half-way down our gullets. I suppose it had to come sooner or later!”
Bee drank the remains of her coffee. “Come on, Brat!” she said, putting out her hand and pulling him to his feet. “We might as well go and get it over. You too, Simon.” She led Brat out of the room, laughing at him, and still hand in hand with him. The warm friendliness of her clasp sent a rush of emotion through him that he could not identify. It was like nothing he had so far experienced in life. And he was too busy with thoughts of the reporter to pause to analyse it.
The library was the dark room at the back of the house where Bee kept her roll-top desk, her accounts, and her reference books. A small young man in a neat blue suit was puzzling over a stud book. At their entrance he dropped the book and said in a rich Glasgow accent: “Miss Ashby? My name is Macallan. I’m working on the Westover Times. I’m awfully sorry about barging in like this, but I thought you’d have finished eating this long time.”
“Well, we began late, and I’m afraid we lingered over things,” Bee said.
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Macallan understandingly. “A very special occasion. I’ve no right to be spoiling it for you, but ‘the first with the latest’ is my motto, and just this minute you’re the latest.”
“I suppose you mean my nephew’s homecoming.”
“Just that.”
“And how did you find out about it so soon, Mr. Macallan?”
“One of my contacts heard about it in one of the Clare pubs.”
“A deplorable word,” said Bee.
“Pub?” Mr. Macallan said, puzzled.
“No. Contact.”
“Och, well, one of my stooges, if you like that better,” Mr. Macallan said agreeably. “Which of these young gentlemen is the returned prodigal, may I ask?”
Bee introduced Brat and Simon. Some of the cold tightness had come back to Simon’s face; but Brat, who had been around when Nat Zucco had cut his throat in the kitchen of his ex-wife’s eating-house and had witnessed the activities of the American Press on that occasion, was entranced by this glimpse of news-gathering in Britain. He answered the obvious questions put to him by Mr. Macallan and wondered if there would be any suggestion of a photograph. If so, he must get out of it somehow.
But it was Bee who saved him from that. No photograph, said Bee. No; positively no photograph. All the information he liked to ask for, but no photograph.
Mr. Macallan accepted this, but reluctantly. “The story of the missing twin won’t be half so good without a photograph,” he complained.
“You’re not going to call it ‘The Missing Twin,’ are you?” Bee said.
“No; he’s going to call it ‘Back From The Dead’,” Simon said, speaking for the first time. His cool drawl fell on the room like a shadow.
Mr. Macallan’s pale blue eyes went to him, rested a moment on him consideringly, and then came back to Bee. “I had thought of ‘Sensation at Clare’,” he said, “but I doubt the Westover Times won’t stand for it. A very conservative organ. But I expect the Daily Clarion will do better.”
“The Clarion!” Bee said. “A London paper! But — but I hope there is no question of that. This is an entirely local — an entirely family matter.”
“So was that affair in Hilldrop Crescent,” Mr. Macallan said.
“What affair?”
“Crippen was the name. The world’s Press is composed of family affairs, Miss Ashby.”
“But this is of no possible interest to anyone but ourselves. When my nephew — disappeared, eight years ago, the Westover Times reported it quite — quite incidentally.”
“Ay, I know. I looked it up. A small paragraph at the bottom of page three.”
“I fail to see why my nephew’s return should be of any more interest than his disappearance.”
“It’s the man-bites-dog affair over again. People go to their deaths every day, but the amount of people who come back from the dead is very small indeed, Miss Ashby. Coming back from the dead, in spite of the advances of modern science, is still a sensation. And that’s why the Daily Clarion is going to be interested.”
“But how should they hear about it?”
“Hear about it!” Mr. Macallan said, genuinely horrified. “Miss Ashby, this is my own scoop, don’t you see.”
“You mean you are going to send the story to the Clarion?”
“Assuredly.”
“Mr. Macallan, you mustn’t; you really must not.”
“Listen, Miss Ashby,” Mr. Macallan said patiently, “I agreed about the no-photographs prohibition, and I respect the agreement — I won’t go sneaking around the countryside trying to snap the young gentlemen unawares, or anything like that — but you can’t ask me to give up a scoop like this. Not a scoop of ‘London daily’ dimensions.” And as Bee, caught in the toils of her natural desire to be fair, hesitated, he added: “Even if I didn’t send them the story, there’s nothing to hinder a sub-editor lifting the story from the Westover Times and making it front-page news. You wouldn’t be a scrap better off and I’d have lost my chance of doing a bit of good for myself.”
“Oh, dear,” Bee said, tacitly acknowledging that he was right, “I suppose that means swarms of newspaper men from London.”
“Och, no. Only the Clarion. If it’s the Clarion’s story none of the rest will bother. And whoever they send down you don’t have to worry. They’re all Balliol men, I understand.”
With which flip at the English Press, Mr. Macallan looked round for his hat and made motions of departure.
“I’m very grateful to you, and to you, Mr. Ashby, for being so accommodating in the matter of information. I won’t keep you any longer. May I offer you my congratulations on your happiness”— for a second the pale blue eyes rested in mild benevolence on Simon —“and my thanks for your kindness.”
“You’re a long way from home, aren’t you, Mr. Macallan?” Bee said conversationally as she went to the front door with him.
“Home?”
“Scotland.”
“Oh, I see. How did you know I was Scots? Oh, my name, of course. Ay, it’s a far cry to Glasgow; but this is just the long way round to London, so to speak. If I’m going to work on an English paper it’s as well to know something of the — the ——”
“Aborigines?” suggested Bee.
“Local conditions, I was going to say,” Mr. Macallan said solemnly.
“Haven’t you a car?” Bee said, looking at the empty sweep in front of the door.
“I left it parked at the end of your drive there. I’ve never got used to sweeping up to strange houses as if I owned them.”
With which startling exhibition of modesty the little man bowed, put on his hat, and walked away.