A Change of Heir (3 page)

‘Well, that was very kind of Mr Gadberry, I’m sure.’ Ma Lapin’s expression had softened. ‘A very nice thought.’ She moved away from the door, looking straight at Gadberry as she did so. ‘But we mustn’t keep you,’ she said. ‘You’ll be wanting to get to the cleaner’s before the rush. Bessie, open the door for Mr Gadberry.’

Bessie did as she was told. Gadberry gave the suitcase a jaunty swing, because it was more or less automatic with him to keep up a bit of acting once he had embarked upon it. In actuality, he noticed, it was surprisingly heavy. But this, he knew, wasn’t why he was a little flushed as he passed through the doorway and made his way into the liberty of the street. Being rather more than normally quick in such matters, he had understood that straight look of Ma Lapin’s in a flash. Of course she hadn’t been for a moment taken in as to what he was about. Come to think of it, no experienced theatrical landlady could have been. It was simply that the blessed sixpence – or was it the damned sixpence? – had tipped some balance in her mind. She had seen him as a poor devil who was down and out, and she had let him go.

Gadberry walked off down the nearly deserted side street. He walked surprisingly quickly, considering the burden he was carrying. This was partly a matter of prudence – the odd old girl might change her mind – and partly because he was bitterly and mysteriously angry. He supposed he was angry with a world that had of late been treating him so scurvily. But he was in no doubt that he was angry with himself as well. The two emotions seemed simultaneously to combine and to conflict. The resulting state of mind was extremely uncomfortable.

He found a telephone kiosk, set down his suitcase where it would be safely in view, and went inside. He made one call which produced no answer, so that he pressed the button and got his money back. He made a second call, and got through, but the resulting conversation was unsatisfactory. He searched round in his head, and made two further calls: the result of one might have been termed inconclusive and embarrassing, and the result of the other came rapidly and unmistakably. He counted his money. These beastly machines had become horribly expensive to operate. He decided to give up. There was a woman waiting impatiently to take his place, and he had an irrational feeling that she knew exactly the humiliating sort of sponging act he’d been engaged on.

He came out of the kiosk, and sat down on the suitcase. This action surprised and even a little frightened him. It was like walking in the gutter. If he just had a few boxes of matches to peddle he would make a perfectly ordinary sort of beggar, engaged in dodging the GLC’s regulations against mendicancy. He found himself wishing that he was either very much younger or very much older. A twelve-year-old waif or stray is an honestly pathetic sort of spectacle. An old, old man in destitution has considerable scope for putting on a turn of marked dignity. Gadberry’s mind wandered, and he found himself wondering whether he could play the part of the Leech Gatherer in a dramatisation of Wordsworth’s celebrated
Resolution and Independence
. Then he became aware that some children were staring at him. Simultaneously, he recalled that his own actual age was twenty-seven. That was the nastiest part of the whole situation. He was twenty-seven, rather tall, rather more than distinctly good-looking, and the possessor of what often seemed to be regarded as an attractive personality. Yet here he was.

He got to his feet. At least, he supposed, he had better find out. He picked up the suitcase and made his way – rather trudgingly, now – to the Underground Station at Waterloo. Charing Cross, he supposed, and then change to the Central Line. He put down his last intact florin before the booking clerk.

‘South Kensington, please,’ he said.

The Chester Court was probably quite an expensive hotel. But what you got for your money there, Gadberry judged, wouldn’t be likely to make much personal appeal to him. It was what elderly people called a ‘quiet’ hotel. No doubt it was ‘old-established’ too. The quietness was something to which you could have taken a knife; there was a large gloomy lounge in which, although it was sparsely populated, you couldn’t imagine anybody speaking in more than a confidential whisper. The old-established effect was secured by ingeniously providing the smell of dust without the appearance of it; the stuff must have been buried deep in the curtains and upholstery. There were a good many palms in pots, and a good many of those rubber trees which, entirely fashionable a few years ago, were now sinking gently in the social scale, so that they were no doubt destined eventually to replace the aspidistra as the sacred emblem of the simplest classes of English society.

Gadberry had some leisure for making these sociological observations while he waited for Mr John Smith, who seemed in no hurry to appear. The Chester Court, incidentally, seemed an unlikely haunt for a person of dubious habits or inclinations. Gadberry drew a certain encouragement from this; perhaps Smith’s proposals would be merely eccentric rather than pathological. Quite a number of the old parties sitting round this lounge undoubtedly harboured one or another of the milder lunacies of senescence. In one corner, for example, there was a garishly dressed elderly female who appeared to insist on carrying a canary round with her in a cage. In another a silver-haired man was delivering himself of a public speech without making any sound at all; you just knew it was a public speech by the eloquent gestures that accompanied it. You could tell that both these people were rather more than just prosperous. Perhaps Mr Smith belonged to the same harmless, pathetic but agreeably solvent world.

And here he was – beard, dark glasses and all. He was coming downstairs with a tread that showed him to be a good deal younger than anybody else in the place. He had on a light overcoat, and he was carrying a suitcase. Gadberry, whose own suitcase was still planted beside him, was struck by this circumstance at once. The direction of Smith’s glance being indetectable, it wasn’t possible to tell whether he had as yet spotted his visitor. Certainly he didn’t come straight in Gadberry’s direction. He went over to a desk saying ‘Reception’ and entered into some negotiation with the person in charge of it. In a moment it became quite clear that he was paying his bill. Gadberry watched this proceeding in some perplexity. He was also obscurely alarmed – so much so (although this was absurd) that he felt prompted to get up and bolt from the hotel. If Smith had booked in here only for the purpose of the present assignation it was pretty well a certainty that he was one sort of bad hat or another.

But Gadberry hesitated. He wasn’t really very clear about his attitude to bad hats. He felt that there was a lot to be said for being anti-social. It was one’s only way of protesting against the rotten way things were arranged. On the other hand it was difficult to be anti-social without at the same time being
anti
some more or less inoffensive individual chap. Even if you robbed a bank – which in itself would be an entirely laudable thing to do – you might find yourself hitting a perfectly nice man on the head, just to save your own skin. And there, Gadberry felt, you got into rather deep water. Nature red in tooth and claw, each man for himself, and so forth: he didn’t seem ever to have worked these things out. He’d got along indifferently well – or ill – without much in the way of agonising appraisal in that sort of territory.

Smith was now moving towards the front door of the hotel, and for a moment Gadberry supposed that he was going to be ignored altogether. But then Smith made a detour that took him just behind Gadberry’s chair.

‘Let’s get out of this,’ Smith murmured. ‘Follow me.’ He spoke as casually as if to an old friend. Without pausing, he walked straight out into the street.

Gadberry took up his own suitcase and followed. It didn’t seem to him that Smith was a very high-class conspirator. For one thing, high-class conspirators don’t think up names like John Smith. And this meeting had been arranged not without suspicious singularity – supposing there to be anybody around who was interested in such things. He himself had come in and asked for Mr Smith. Mr Smith had presumably been told he had a visitor; and this rather dim conspiratorial scene had followed. It was like something out of a bad spy story. But of course neither the woman at the reception-desk nor the porter near the door was very likely to have spies in mind, or to be taking the slightest interest in Mr Smith as he checked out.

Once on the pavement, Smith slackened his pace until Gadberry caught up with him. They turned a corner, and Smith spoke.

‘That thing heavy?’ He nodded his bearded visage to indicate Gadberry’s suitcase. ‘We haven’t far to go.’

‘Tolerably,’ Gadberry said, rather shortly. He was beginning to think his treatment improperly unceremonious.

‘Holds everything you possess, I suppose. But we’ll soon settle all that.’

This time Gadberry said nothing at all. He was outraged that the person calling himself Smith should be in a position to offer this accurate conjecture. Smith must have had more conversation with Falsetto than Falsetto had reported. And Falsetto must have a more precise sense of Gadberry’s depressed situation than he was entitled to.

‘Do you mind?’ Smith had stopped by the kerb and again jerked his head. This time it was towards the centre of the road, into which there was dug one of those subterraneous retreats which in London are labelled either ‘men’ or ‘gentlemen’ according – one must suppose – to the political complexion of the particular local council involved. ‘Only a jiffy,’ Smith added reassuringly. Suitcase and all, he walked across the road and vanished underground.

Gadberry found it hard not to be indignant. Smith might reasonably have been expected to give thought to a matter of this sort before quitting his hotel. Gadberry looked up and down the road. If there had been a bus to board he would have boarded it. But there wasn’t. If he simply hurried away on foot – burdened still by this damned suitcase – Smith would emerge from his retirement in plenty of time to give pursuit. So Gadberry stayed put. For one thing, he was now pretty curious about Smith.

Some minutes went by, and Smith didn’t reappear – although several other people bobbed up above ground and went about their business. Gadberry suddenly noticed that this particular convenience was of the commodious sort that has an entrance at each end. He hadn’t been keeping an eye on the farther end. Perhaps Smith had come up that way and vanished. Perhaps the whole thing was some peculiarly pointless species of practical joke.

Now another man came up. He was in a dark suit, and was carrying a suitcase. Gadberry recognised the suitcase. Then – after a fashion – he recognised the man. It was Smith transformed. The dark glasses had vanished, and the beard had vanished also. Smith crossed to the pavement.

‘Well, that’s better!’ he said cheerfully – very much, indeed, as if he had in fact achieved some physical ease. ‘We can be getting along.’

They got along. As they did so, two perceptions, each disconcerting, came to Gadberry. The first was a matter of more or less professional observation. Smith wasn’t newly shaved. He smelt faintly of a kind of spirit with which Gadberry was familiar. The beard had been a false beard of the sort that you can soak off in no time. Gadberry was disturbed that he had been so thick as not to spot this at once.

There was now something familiar about Smith. Gadberry felt that he had seen him before. This was the second disconcerting fact – and it was much
more
disconcerting than the first. It occurred to him that he had perhaps had some forgotten brush with Smith in the past, and that the circumstances had been such as to give Smith some sinister hold over him now. But this was a morbid notion, since Gadberry had never really had quite that sort of past.

‘By the way,’ Smith said – and his tone had an oddly throw-away quality that seemed habitual with him – ‘my name’s Comberford. Spelt with two
o
’s but the first part rhymes with “lumber”. Nicholas Comberford.’

‘My name’s Gadberry,’ Gadberry said. ‘And it has never been anything else.’

‘All right, all right! You needn’t be arrogant about it. You never know, you know.’ Smith or Comberford continued cheerfully vague. ‘You might have to change your name tomorrow. And why not? I don’t think Gadberry’s much of a name. Entirely plebeian in origin, I’d imagine.’

‘Look here–’

‘All right, all right! I know you’ve had the education of a gentleman, and all that. It wouldn’t be any good – would it? – if you
hadn’t
. I’m just saying that if you did have to lose your name, Gadberry isn’t much of a name to lose. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t at all see why I might have to change my name.’

‘You might have a wealthy aunt with aristocratic connections. She might disapprove of your upstart father–’

‘Look here, I didn’t have–’

‘I’m only putting a case, old chap. This wealthy aunt might leave you a fortune, on condition that you took her name. Cholmondeley, for instance, or Fetherstonhaugh, or–’

‘I think this is a very stupid conversation.’

‘So it is.’ Nicholas Comberford nodded emphatically. ‘It’s about Gadberry, which I was saying is rather a stupid name.’

‘It’s a very old name.’ Rather unexpectedly, Gadberry found himself concerned to vindicate his lineage. ‘There was a Gadberry in the seventeenth century, if you want to know. Only he spelt it Gadbury, with a
u
.’

‘And what did he do?’

‘He was an astrologer, as a matter of fact. But right at the top of his profession.’

‘You’re not right at the top of yours, are you, Gadberry, old chap?’

Not unnaturally, this impertinence outraged Gadberry. It came into his head that he ought perhaps to hit Comberford on the jaw. But he doubted whether he could do this effectively without putting down his suitcase – and even, in common fairness, without inviting Comberford to do the same. This seemed awkwardly elaborate. Moreover it was dawning on Gadberry that conceivably he was taking rather a liking to this objectionable person. He didn’t at all know why. Perhaps it was simply that, whatever the man was up to, it wasn’t any of those boring and unacceptable proceedings that Gadberry had been envisaging. Moreover Comberford was a rogue. He couldn’t but be a rogue. In fact he was a crook. Only crooks disguise or undisguise themselves in public lavatories. Gadberry was interested.