A Change of Heir (10 page)

‘Well – I mean not going too much old Grimble’s way. I do sometimes feel she’s a bit odd. Seeming to think she lives in a society that vanished a century ago. And talking like a book in her great-grandfather’s library. It worries me at times.’

‘My dear Comberford, I wouldn’t
worry
.’ Pollock seemed amused. ‘Mrs Minton is perfectly clear in her head. She knows just what she’s doing. Even if there were much nearer relations, they wouldn’t have a chance of going into court and successfully upsetting your apple-cart. Forgive me if I’m being too candid. It’s a consideration it’s perfectly natural and proper you should have in your head.’

‘I see,’ Gadberry said a little awkwardly. He supposed he
had
been fishing for something like this. ‘Of course I’d be glad anyway that Aunt Prudence isn’t going potty.’

‘Well, she may be – at a reasonable sort of pace. I must admit that she has become a little more eccentric since I first came to the practice here. Later on, the process may be accelerated. In your new position, I feel it’s proper you should be told this. You’ll have to make any necessary arrangements, after all.’ Pollock paused. ‘I wonder where Grimble’s got to? A single telephone call oughtn’t to be taking all this time.’

‘Perhaps I’d better go and see.’ Gadberry half rose from his chair, and then suddenly sat down again. He was aware that something rather puzzling had turned up. ‘But I’m not quite sure what you mean. About my great-aunt, that’s to say.’

‘You mustn’t think it too sinister.’ Pollock seemed aware that he must dish out what his profession terms reassurance. ‘Plenty of the very old sink finally into senile dementia. It has it’s painful side, of course. But nowadays we know how to handle these things pretty well. Particularly where money’s no problem.’

‘I see.’ In point of fact, Gadberry’s mind was beginning to grope in a great darkness. ‘But Aunt Prudence’s physical condition – well, isn’t that relevant?’

‘Extremely so, my dear Comberford. It’s precisely what I’m saying. You must be aware, I suppose, that Mrs Minton has the typical physical constitution of a likely centenarian – the very type whose mind is bound to go long before her body. But I assure you this need occasion you no distress. Long-drawn-out terminal illness associated with physical pain and decay is far the more harrowing thing all round.’

‘You mean that Aunt Prudence hasn’t hurried on all this because she knows she’s in a bad way – with a heart, or something like that?’

As he asked this question, Gadberry was aware that he had admitted into his voice inflections of the largest perturbation and dismay. It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that Dr Pollock was now looking at him very curiously indeed.

‘A heart? Whatever should put that in your head? The old lady hasn’t been telling you anything of the sort, surely? She doesn’t strike me as likely to start imagining things about herself. She’s simply not a hypochondriac type. Not that phobia about heart disease is all that rare.’ Pollock was silent for a moment – perhaps, Gadberry thought, through embarrassment at finding himself in the presence of a young man who had demonstrably been nourishing baseless hopes about the speedy demise of a near relative. And now he spoke a trifle shortly. ‘I’m your great-aunt’s doctor,’ he said, ‘or what she would probably call her medical adviser. It wouldn’t be proper for me to discuss her health in any detail. But what I’ve said, my dear man, I’ve said. She’s as sound as a bell. Your anxieties – and you seem to go in for them in what is no doubt a very creditable way – are entirely beside the mark.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Gadberry, strangely enough, was able to say this with some sense of conviction. Long years with Aunt Prudence, it was true, constituted a vision he knew he simply couldn’t dig. On the other hand, the fact that she could scarcely be said to possess an amiable personality hadn’t resulted in his wishing her other than well. At least he found that he didn’t in the least wish her ill. ‘Shall we find Grimble,’ he heard himself say, ‘and think about joining the ladies?’

Gadberry licked a finger and thumb, and with a reasonably steady hand extinguished the half-dozen candles on the dinner-table. It occurred to him that Pollock’s profession had probably given him a sufficiently disenchanted view of human nature to cause him to think little of what had occurred. But with Gadberry himself it was a different matter. It wasn’t simply as one cheated of the speedy expectation of an inheritance that he was disconcerted. In fact it wasn’t as that at all. He was experiencing, once more, that nasty feeling of being a prominent actor in an increasingly unintelligible play. And it was a play, he suspected, now rapidly approaching its denouement.

There was nothing modish about the general decor of Bruton Abbey. The fabric was mediaeval, with bits and pieces added by eminent eighteenth-century architects in the Picturesque Taste. The furniture, for some mysterious reason to which Gadberry had not yet succeeded in penetrating, was almost exclusively Victorian. The pictures, of which there were a great many, ran to nothing – Gadberry had sometimes reflected – which would have appeared out of the way to his former landlady Mrs Lapin herself. Apart from a startlingly indecent nude by Etty which hung bang over the drawing-room chimney piece, most appeared to be by Landseer in his vein as a celebrant of the indigenous fauna of Great Britain. The Abbey being, moreover, in some disrepair, and thus affording easy ingress to the actual brute creation, these mute representations were sometimes oddly reinforced from without. It was quite common to come upon an owl perched above a Monarch of the Glen, or a couple of bats depending from the frame of some murkily evoked rural scene. In places, indeed, it might have been possible to suppose that Mrs Minton had gone in for certain decorative notions of a modern and ephemeral sort, as when interior walls were discovered to be clothed in matted growths of ivy. These irruptions of wild nature were the odder when one reflected that they couldn’t conceivably be a consequence of penury. They must simply be part of Mrs Minton’s conception of a feudal order of things to which she subscribed.

In the cloisters now there was an eerie light reflected from the snow beginning to silt up outside, and through some open or broken casement flakes were floating in with sufficient freedom to be falling damply on one’s face as one walked. And everywhere there was a sufficient effect of moaning, rattling and creaking to suggest that quite a gale was blowing up.

Conducting Dr Pollock through these dismal effects, the spurious Nicholas Comberford recalled gloomily his authentic counterpart’s having remarked that Bruton Abbey enjoyed a somewhat remote situation. It was certainly true. The tiny village of Bruton was a mile away, and apart from this there was nothing within walking distance except monotonous stretches of moor. Gadberry, for long a dweller in cities, had only to think of it to feel very lonesome indeed.

But at present he had a different preoccupation. It had been strange enough that Comberford had proved totally misinformed in the matter of his great-aunt’s attitude to alcohol. It was very much stranger that he had been equally astray as to her state of health. He had declared categorically that she was in an advanced stage of heart disease – and now here was Dr Pollock, who must know, laughing such an idea out of court. But
must
Pollock know? Was it possible that the old lady was really very ill, and had for some reason successfully concealed the fact from the local doctor?

Gadberry, as he made a detour in search of the missing Grimble, considered this supposition on its merits. But of course it
had
no merits. For one thing, as soon as you really thought of the matter, you realised that a mortally sick woman was about the last thing that Aunt Prudence corresponded to. For another thing –

Here Gadberry broke off, for a consideration of the utmost simplicity had suddenly occurred to him. The real Comberford had been in no position to entertain any confident knowledge about his great-aunt’s state of health. Until the receipt of her letter proposing that he should domesticate himself at Bruton there had been no suggestion that he had held any recent communication with her. So how could he have the intimate information he had claimed?

The Abbey was not, at this time of year, a place in which it was at all easy to feel suddenly cold. But Gadberry felt just this now. For he realised – and he acknowledged to himself that it was a realisation pitifully belated – that Comberford was a shocking liar, and that the whole business of Mrs Minton’s brief expectation of life had been fed to him simply to make her relative’s extraordinary proposal appear a little more attractive than it would otherwise have been. Big money from the conspiracy, and big money in reasonable time, would have appeared to Comberford his strongest card, and he had led with it straightaway. Really and truly, big money had been only an uncertain prospect a long way ahead.

This was what it was now, despite Gadberry’s spectacular promotion of only an hour ago. A half-share in £5,000 a year might still be what his efforts were pulling in when Mrs Minton was celebrating her hundredth birthday. What was more, it would be all that Comberford in his Riviera seclusion was pulling in too. There was something puzzling about the whole thing.

The suspicion that he had been cheated – that his own imposture was conducting itself, so to speak, inside another one in which he himself was the dupe – didn’t, Gadberry found, very much annoy him in itself. He didn’t feel morally outraged by his discovery; indeed, there would have been a certain unreasonableness in a reaction of that sort, since any such situation placed him, after all, in the role of the biter bit, and one mustn’t expect honour among thieves. There was a sense in which he was even relieved, since Mrs Minton’s death – or so he had been coming to think – must finally and fatally involve him in permanent deception on an intimidating scale. In this feeling he was again, perhaps, up against a magical sense of the thing. His present situation could be viewed as a fantastic lark. But there was a kind of death in the notion that never in life could plain George Gadberry – but also talented George Gadberry, for had he not enjoyed that big success in
The
Rubbish Dump?
– bob up again.

Of course Gadberry could, he supposed, bob up again
now
. All that was necessary was the resolution to make a clean break. He had only to pack a small bag, stuff his pockets with as much cash as his own sporadically operative conscience would permit, and hasten away from Bruton through its rising winds and falling snows. Out, out into the storm: such a departure would have a certain theatrical quality that made an appeal to him. He might even accomplish the initial stage of his flight here and now by commandeering Mr Grimble’s fly.

At this moment Mr Grimble made his appearance again. He seemed to have been straying around the imperfectly enclosed cloisters for some time. Snow was sprinkled on his shoulders and the rime sparkled in his beard. He would have looked like Father Christmas if there hadn’t been something about him more suggestive of an imp or troll. He greeted Gadberry with a cackle of laughter, and with a gleeful rubbing together of his hands which, although no doubt no more than a precautionary measure against frostbite, somehow conveyed an impression of cunning which Gadberry didn’t like. Quite unreasonably, Gadberry found himself rather frightened of this disagreeable but presumably harmless old creature.

‘Did you get through, sir?’ he asked solicitously. He had a notion that it especially became the heir of Bruton to adopt a deferential attitude towards a dependant so venerably advanced as Grimble within the vale of years.

‘Everything is in train, Comberford, everything is in train.’ Something sinister about the manner in which Grimble said this was enhanced – or perhaps it was merely suggested – by a particularly desperate hooting-act put on at this moment by one of the Abbey’s resident owls. For all its feathers – Gadberry supposed – the creature was a-cold. ‘In train, I say, in train,’ Grimble repeated. His frosted breath hung around like a miasma. The temperature must be dropping like a stone. Grimble seemed aware of the phenomenon himself. ‘This place is too cold for hell,’ he said, and walked on.

Boulter, who had a commendable instinct to achieve some effect of sanity in those spheres of Bruton life that lay within his province, had contrived in the drawing-room a fire before which it would have been perfectly feasible to roast an ox. Unfortunately most of the heat that didn’t go straight up the chimney made its way into the dim vaulting that hung overhead. Had it been possible for the company to levitate to this region and conduct their post-prandial civilities while hovering thirty feet above the floor, it was conceivable that quite a cosy hour might have been the result. As it was, Mrs Minton’s household and her guests became progressively numb and dumb. Perhaps, Gadberry thought, a certain amount of conversation was actually being produced, only to be congealed at the point of utterance. Perhaps, as in Baron Münchausen’s narrative, a thaw would one day release it, and there would be a babble of inane chatter in the empty room.

Meantime, he had leisure to continue to picture himself as fled into the storm. There appeared to be no reason why he could not make a quick end of the whole business. If he simply vanished, he supposed, it might be assumed that he had met with some misadventure or accident, and a vexatious pursuit might ensue. But why shouldn’t he, in his character as Nicholas Comberford, leave a note saying that he couldn’t stand the place, and that if Mrs Minton wanted an heir she must try again? If he’d really had as much as he could take, or if he was prompted to act decisively in terms of that obscure recurrent alarm occasioned in him by a sense of unknown factors in his situation, then giving mortal offence in this fashion was undoubtedly the easiest way out. Mrs Minton, one could be sure, far from attempting to recall him, would never mention the name of her great-nephew Nicholas again.

But the trouble about this was that it really wouldn’t be a nice thing to do. Aunt Prudence was in various ways an intolerable old person, but as far as he himself was concerned there was no denying that she deserved well of him. If she liked anybody in the world, it was clearly the young man who was in fact sheltering beneath her roof (if sheltering, indeed, it could be called in this temple of the winds or palace of ice) as a consequence of gross imposture. To bolt – certainly to bolt after having left some nasty message as a parting shot – would be to do rather more than simply let Aunt Prudence down. It would be to bite the hand that fed him, and that had just made the gesture of proposing to feed him a great deal more.