A Change of Heir (9 page)

‘Moreover,’ Mrs Minton was saying, ‘the young man is as yet unmarried. Nicholas, I think that is correct?’

‘Yes, Aunt Prudence. Of course. It’s something I just haven’t got round to thinking of.’ Gadberry’s response was rather at random. ‘But I suppose I must find a nice girl one day.’

‘Don’t be foolish, Nicholas. I refer to the Hartley’s heir, and to another instance of their negligence. It appears that they have taken no steps to secure an advantageous connection for the young man. Nothing could be more injudicious. He may suppose himself free to walk out tomorrow and marry the daughter of a clergyman or a dentist.’ Aunt Prudence looked sternly at Mr Grimble as she said this, so that Gadberry wondered whether the old parasite was nursing improper ambitions in regard to a leash of great-grand-daughters of his own. He also wondered whether he, Gadberry, had an advantageous connection being cooked up for him by Aunt Prudence at this moment. Nothing, come to think of it, was more probable – and yet it was something which, until this moment, hadn’t entered his head. For he was still a bit short, so to speak, in catching the wave-length of Aunt Prudence’s distinctly dynastic and autocratic way of thinking. It was his sense of the old lady that he was fairly briskly advancing in her favour. Her increasing brusqueness (he was fairly sure) was in fact a sign of this. But perhaps he must reckon with the further fact that as one thus advanced in her good books one was expected to become more and more her creature. Certainly that was how Miss Bostock appeared to hold down her job. Feeling rather depressed again, Gadberry finished his Madeira. It didn’t really go too well with roast turkey. He wondered whether any more liquor would be forthcoming during the latter part of this protracted meal.

‘Boulter,’ Mrs Minton said sharply, ‘attend on Mr Nicholas. He may wish to give instructions on the wine.’ She glanced round the table, and it was evident that she was very conscious of the portentous silence that this had produced. ‘In future you are to take your station behind him.’

As Mrs Minton uttered these yet more staggering words, Gadberry was conscious of receiving a sharp blow on the side of his head. For a confused moment he rather supposed that Miss Bostock had relieved her feelings by the dramatic expedient of giving him a clip on the ear. She had merely, however, taken a rash jab at a roasted potato – virtually armour-plated, as roasted potatoes at Bruton tended to be – and inadvertently turned it into a projectile. And now her apology for this mishap struck Gadberry as merely formal, and indeed perfunctory. Mentally, he put a corroborative tick, so to speak, against his previously registered impression that Miss Bostock was an enemy. But if he found himself feeling uneasy – even a little dizzy – it wasn’t because of anything of this kind. It came rather from a feeling that fortune’s wheel had begun to revolve more rapidly than was comfortable. The only conceivable explanation of these changed dispositions at Mrs Minton’s board was that she had made up her mind that his period of probation or apprenticeship at Bruton was over. He was on the up and up at such a pace that it seemed impossible that the mere momentum of the thing wouldn’t take him flashing past his apex to return ruining into the gulfs below.

In this Gadberry had conceivably hit upon a merely superstitious reaction to what was happening. At the same time, if very obscurely, he was aware of the return of something like moral crisis. Keeping up his incredible imposture was a feat so crazy as to carry a kind of sustaining exhilaration along with it. He wasn’t at all sure that he really wanted, on the other hand, to bring the deception definitively off. For one thing, a lifetime at Bruton – even with Miss Bostock sacked and Aunt Prudence herself departed to the shades – was a state of affairs he couldn’t really see the shape of or get a feeling for. For another thing, the less he liked Mrs Minton (and he was coming to feel he didn’t like her at all) the less did he want to gull and cheat her. This was a paradox so odd that he could make nothing of it. But he was quite clear as to his central perception. To travel hopefully (which was what he had been doing) was rather fun. But he didn’t terribly want to arrive. Perhaps – he told himself – he had been clinging in a muzzy way to the entirely untenable notion that what he was engaged upon was essentially an enormous practical joke. If Aunt Prudence were to die tomorrow (and why, with that shockingly bad heart, shouldn’t she?) and he were to find himself her heir the day after, it wouldn’t be at all easy to continue viewing his achievements in anything like that light. He, George Gadberry, so rationally ready to compound with fate for modest satisfactions, would in fact have become one of the big-time crooks of the century.

‘Comberford? I think not.’

‘What’s that, Aunt Prudence?’ Gadberry realised that he had been wool-gathering, so that the words just addressed to him were unintelligible. He glanced up the table at Mrs Minton as he spoke, and it struck him that she was returning his gaze with peculiar severity.

‘I am saying, sir, that the sooner you cease to call yourself Nicholas Comberford the better. And I think you know why.’

Very naturally, the dizzy sensation that had lately assailed Gadberry returned upon him at this juncture with redoubled force. He was unmasked. Aunt Prudence – never to be Aunt Prudence again – had penetrated to his deception, and during this meal had been ministering to his fatuous sense of triumphant cunning only the more staggeringly to deliver this lethal blow. Gadberry wondered whether he should rise and make a dash for freedom. Boulter was portly and lumbering; Mr Grimble was in uncertain command of any bodily functions other than that of appetite; Dr Pollock looked scarcely formidable. He could make good at least the first stage of a getaway easily enough.

‘Minton-Comberford is possible,’ he heard Aunt Prudence saying. ‘But Comberford-Minton is more euphonious. In the circumstances, moreover, I believe that it will be more correct.’ Mrs Minton paused to pick up a glass of claret – for Boulter had now with admirable celerity provided this auxiliary beverage. ‘Not that, at the moment, the matter can be absolutely determined upon. Comberford-Minton-Minton is another possibility. I shall not enter further into this at present. It would be inappropriate.’ Mrs Minton glanced at Grimble, the Pollocks and Miss Bostock in turn, as if to underline the indisputable fact that these were persons whose humble station excluded them from taking any useful part in such deliberations. ‘On the other hand,’ Mrs Minton pursued, ‘affability and condescension – social virtues the value of which my dear father early impressed upon me – prompt me to make an announcement upon this unassuming occasion. Nicholas – Nicholas Comberford-Minton-Minton, as he may have to become – is to be my heir. My man of business is to wait upon me tomorrow, so that the necessary dispositions may be made. Meanwhile, I would ask you to drink to dear Nicholas’ health.’

This was solemnly done. Gadberry, although his head was reeling, remembered to do most of the right things. They included shaking hands with Boulter – an obvious turn when affability and condescension were at a premium. With Aunt Prudence this went down very well, as did the suggestion that in the servants’ hall the occasion should be celebrated by a moderate issue of small beer. Grimble had improved the occasion by securing the claret jug and contriving to hang on to it in a manner so suggestive of his sacerdotal functions that Boulter had rapidly to decant another couple of bottles. Mrs Pollock had gone into a kind of fawning routine which struck Gadberry as of a spine-chilling order. Dr Pollock, on the other hand, preserved a mildly ironical social competence which Gadberry liked better – although it prompted him, indeed, to make a mental note that here was somebody to keep a wary eye on. Miss Bostock produced conventional tokens of pleasure. The conventionality was unsurprising. At the same time, Gadberry was conscious of a lurking sense that the woman was
really
pleased. He found this perplexing. It didn’t appear to be an evening upon which everything was coming her way.

The party presently settled down to consume trifle – a children’s-party confection which Aunt Prudence had probably ordered as a dish appropriate upon occasions of high festivity. It would commonly have reeked of Australian sherry – only (as Gadberry suspected) the admirable Boulter had dug an unobtrusive hole in it and poured in half a bottle of brandy. Under the influence of this, and of a further couple of glasses of claret rapidly consumed, Gadberry began to feel quite cheerful. He
had
arrived; there was no more hopeful travelling to do; after some mumbo-jumbo with lawyers on the following day he would never be George Gadberry again. He wouldn’t even be Nicholas Comberford. He would be Nicholas Comberford-Minton-Minton. He would have to
say
‘Comberford-Minton-Minton’ whenever he was asked his name by a shopkeeper or a policeman. This struck him (for the moment) as extremely funny. The thought of it carried comforting suggestions of that outsize practical joke. Not that the thought of a policeman was a particularly happy one. It engendered a lurking vision of
Comberford-Minton-Minton
making banner headlines in the national press in connection with something nasty transacting itself between the bench and the dock at the Old Bailey.

Despite this sobering reflection, Gadberry found himself, a few minutes later, getting the ladies out of the dining-room with the due authority of an heir. He summoned the gentleman to his either hand, preserving the proper manner of a junior who is also a host. When Boulter brought in coffee, he invited him to drink a glass of port before nodding to him to withdraw. For just a few minutes, he contrived a vision of himself as leading this sort of life for ever and ever.

It was difficult to tell whether the Reverend Mr Grimble had made much of what was going on. During the latter part of dinner, and from the point at which the claret had appeared, any residual coherence which his venerable condition had left in his conversation had rapidly attenuated itself. He was now contenting himself with an occasional malign mumble. At least Gadberry judged it to be malign – a conclusion reinforced by the equally occasional flashing out, above the bird’s-nest beard, of a glance disconcertingly suggestive of gleeful cunning. It would have been almost possible to persuade oneself – Gadberry reflected – that Grimble was nursing the consciousness of some enormous practical joke on his own part. But that, of course, was impossible. That such a notion should come into Gadberry’s head merely instanced the chronic suspiciousness which his peculiar situation prompted, and which had already been operative that evening in relation to Miss Bostock. Grimble was as witless as a dotard in an old play.

But at least he was aware of the weather. Having elicited from Boulter when handing the coffee that it was now snowing hard, he presently rose unsteadily to his feet with the announcement that he proposed to call the fly. The fly, Gadberry knew, was some species of superannuated horse-drawn vehicle to be hired in the village, and it seemed to him that he wasn’t stretching his new status too far in immediately proposing to send the old gentleman home in one of the Abbey cars. Grimble, however, rejected this suggestion testily. He even refused to let the fly be telephoned for by a servant. All servants were unreliable nowadays, and he didn’t want the job made a mess of. Nor would he hear of its being undertaken for him by his young host. He would make his way to the instrument himself. Having more or less intelligibly intimated this much, Grimble wandered round the dining-room, tried his best to quit it through a succession of cupboards, and then did eventually find the door and disappear.

‘I say – do you think the old boy can really make a telephone call?’ Gadberry put this to Dr Pollock rather as if seeking a professional opinion.

‘It’s not impossible. And, if he doesn’t, we can sort the thing out later. The old value their independence, you know. One ought to think twice every time, before impairing their sense of it. And Grimble is laudably well able to look after himself.’

‘But he wanders a bit in his mind, doesn’t he? At matins last Sunday, for instance. He seemed to keep losing his place and repeating himself. We prayed three times for the High Court of Parliament. That can’t have been right.’

‘Perhaps he thinks this lot can do with all the intercession it’s possible to muster up.’ Pollock, who had lit a pipe, was chatting easily and in a tone of cool friendliness that Gadberry rather liked. Pollock didn’t seem much impressed by the events of the evening. ‘And I often notice method in Grimble’s madness. For example, I’ll bet you were out of church on the dot, as usual. If he repeats one thing, he omits another. So nobody much minds. And it wouldn’t matter if they did – unless, of course, it was the Bishop.’

‘Or Aunt Prudence.’

‘Ah.’ Pollock didn’t take up this joke. ‘Do you plan to spend most of your time at the Abbey? Let me congratulate you again, by the way, on what your great-aunt was telling us.’

‘Yes, I expect I’ll stay around a good deal. And thank you very much. But Aunt Prudence has been a bit precipitate, if you ask me. I seem to have been here a very short time, and I’d rather have had longer to play myself in.’ Gadberry was conscious, as he made this speech, that it did, oddly enough, reflect his actual feelings.

‘You must have been handling the bowling masterfully in the opening overs.’ Pollock said this with the touch of irony he was apt to produce from time to time. This too Gadberry rather liked, but nevertheless it had an effect of setting him on his guard.

‘I must seem an absolute fortune hunter, you know.’ Gadberry had recourse to his ingenuous note. ‘But the point is that there’s pretty well nobody else. Both Mintons and Comberfords have become thin on the ground. Hence this business of the grand new surname, I suppose. But I just wish Aunt Prudence hadn’t been in such a hurry. Of course, I can understand her motive.’ Gadberry paused, fleetingly aware of indiscretion. ‘She’s all right, I suppose, on the mental side?’

‘The mental side?’ Pollock took his pipe from his mouth and glanced at Gadberry curiously.