Bland Beginning (8 page)

“Good Lord, yes. I say, how on earth did you know?” Anthony was astonished. “I say, don’t tell me you’re interested in cricket.”

“Certainly I am.”

“I say, that’s absolutely splendid.” In his enthusiasm Anthony took hold of her arm as they went through the doors. “We should have won that match,” he said as they sat down at table. “But old Parker set such a damned silly field for their tail-enders that half the catches didn’t go to hand.” He stopped. “I say, I must be boring you. It’s so good to have someone to talk shop with, you know.”

She raised her thick eyebrows. “You’re not playing this year?”

“No. Vicky – she’s the girl I’m engaged to, Vicky Rawlings, you know – doesn’t like cricket, so I’ve given it up. Waste of time for a grown man, she thinks. I expect she’s right.”

“I didn’t know you were engaged to her,” Ruth Cleverly said. She added, apparently after some thought: “I saw one day of the match last year. Thought you bowled awfully well.”

“Oh, did you?” He was delighted. “But I bowled a bit in the nets in the winter, and I think I’ve developed in some ways.”

“Have you now?” said Miss Cleverly.

“When I had the new ball I used to make it go away for slip catches, and occasionally bring one back from the off. Now, I’ve been experimenting with a ball swinging the other way – towards the leg side. Supposing you had a ring of fieldsmen on the leg side – but I say, this is all awfully complicated for you.”

“Do go on,” she said, and Anthony went on, through soup and Lobster Newburg. When they reached the sweet he looked at his watch. “I say.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cleverly, leaning forward a little.

His face was radiant. “We’ve just got time to get down to Lord’s for an hour or two, if you’d like to.”

She sat back. The expression on her monkeyish features was enigmatic. “I believe you think I don’t do any work. I’ve got to get back to the office and see a printer. Sweet of you to ask me.”

“Work? Oh yes,” Anthony said disconsolately. “Then we shall have to think about this thing again.” He tapped the briefcase containing
Passion and Repentance.
“I say, I have enjoyed this lunch, Miss –”

“You’d better call me Ruth.” She smiled, and showed white, even teeth. “All my friends do – like poor Arthur Jebb.”

“I’m awfully sorry I upset him. I didn’t mean to, you know – about leaving this thing with him. But hang it, I did pay a hundred guineas for the thing, and I gave it to Vicky too, so it’s hers really.” Anthony wrinkled his fine, straight nose. “But I didn’t mean to upset him. I’m sure he meant to be helpful and all that, but I didn’t much like him.”

“Arthur? You should feel sorry for him. He has no power in his legs – they’re no larger than a child’s.”

Anthony stared at the tablecloth. “It seemed to me he was awfully anxious to get hold of
this
.” He tapped the briefcase again.

She stared at him. “Of course – so that he could make the paper test.”

“I suppose so. But he seems a bit obsessed by it all, doesn’t he? Got a bit of a kink, I suppose. Those ideas about a master forger – things like that don’t happen, do they?” His face brightened. “It would be fun, though, if Vicky turned up a lot of things about forgery in her old attic.”

Her face was quite blank. “I must go back to work. Thank you for a nice lunch.”

“I say – I say.” Like a great protesting puppy, Anthony rose from his seat in alarm. “I haven’t upset you too, have I, with what I said about old Jebb?”

With the same frozen face she said, “Not at all. Just that you’ve got a suspicious mind. You can’t help it.”

Anthony bumbled across the room after her as she rushed along, throwing remarks over her shoulder. “I suppose you thought I’d take you along to somebody who’d steal your damned book. Jebb’s a research worker – you wouldn’t understand that. To the pure all things are impure.” At last he caught her up, and she turned to him a face no longer frozen, but suffused with colour.

“Look here, I’m most terribly sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just that I’m out of my depth in all these theories about type faces and publishers’ names. And even experts don’t seem to agree. And he is a bit odd, you must admit, your friend Jebb. Please forgive me.”

She gave him a sad monkey smile. “I forgive you. Poor Anthony. You’d be more at home with a ring of fieldsmen on the leg-side.”

He threw back his head in a great roar of laughter. What a grand girl she is, he thought as they walked out of Scott’s. And, he noticed as she walked in front of him, she had very nice legs.

Anthony did not, after all, spend the afternoon at Lord’s. He telephoned Barnsfield, learned that his father would be out to dinner, and said that he was bringing home three guests. Then, moved by an impulse he could not have explained, he went to several booksellers in and round about Piccadilly, and asked for a first edition of
Passion and Repentance.
His enquiries achieved no purpose, except to assure him of the rarity of the little book that he carried in his briefcase. He looked forward with apprehension to meeting Michael Blackburn – suppose he should turn out to be another Henderson?

But Michael Blackburn was not in the least like Stuart Henderson. Something over fifty years old, and more than six feet in height, he presented to Anthony an upright figure and a fine head with a halo of grey hair, a strong nose and mouth and a weak chin. He treated Henderson with an amused but not unfriendly condescension which, Anthony felt, was too kind to the antics of that little man; he spoke to Anthony as to one on terms of warm equality, and to Ruth Cleverly with a slightly exaggerated deference which she seemed not altogether to relish.

Blackburn lived with his mother in a small house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. She was a splendid old lady with white hair who poured weak tea into delicate china cups, gave them thin bread and butter, and made small talk about the iniquities of the Government, and the recent visit to England of the King and Queen of Italy. They drank their tea on a tiny but perfectly-kept lawn at the back of the house; and, whether because of the unaccustomed mental strain to which he had been subjected during that day, or because of the warmth of the May afternoon, Anthony found himself lulled into a kind of waking daydream in which the tinkling cups and the smooth, gentle, cultured voices formed an undisturbing pattern. A kind of film formed over his mind and behind the film it seemed to him that he was about to discover the secret of his questionable first edition, a secret that had something to do with Miss Cleverly, and with the thin hands of Jebb and the scarred face of Basingstoke. The secret was just about to be revealed when the film over his mind broke at the sound of his own name. Blackburn, leaning forward, was suggesting that they should go inside the house, and his mother, rising from the table, said with a benevolent smile, “Now that I have dispensed my duties as hostess, Michael, I shall return to
The Dolly Dialogues
.”

Blackburn laughed as he led the way into the house. He addressed Henderson, but his hand was placed, like a feather, on Anthony’s arm. “Can you believe, my dear Stuart, that my mother has never read a work of fiction published after 1900? I assure you that is the case. Upon her fine nineteenth-century taste the lists of present-day publishers ask in vain for acknowledgement. How horrified you must feel, Stuart, and you too, Miss Cleverly, ruthless modernist that you are, by this confrontation with one to whom H G Wells is an outrageously new author.”

“Old novels are so much more interesting, I find,” said Mrs Blackburn. “But I can’t expect you to agree with me, my dear,” she said to Miss Cleverly.

“I
have
read some books published before 1900,” she said rather acidly, and Henderson rushed in to cover a moment of awkwardness: “But I think that’s perfectly
splendid
, Mrs Blackburn. I only wish I had time myself to go back more to the classics and read less of the trash that’s written and – whisper it only –
published
nowadays. Dickens, Trollope, George Meredith,” he sang, as though he were intoning a psalm. “Ah, we can’t match them nowadays.”

“I’m sure you are right,” Mrs Blackburn said placidly. “But personally I prefer Anthony Hope and F Marion Crawford.” She left them a little disconcerted.

Another book-lined room, Anthony thought gloomily as they settled down in what he supposed was Blackburn’s study; but the tasteful and ordered luxury here contrasted very pleasantly with Jebb’s untidy workroom. Here the curtains were of heavy red velvet, and rich gilt frames on the walls enclosed pictures of the brownish shade favoured by Anthony in painting. They were offered cigarettes from an oddly-carved mother-of-pearl box, which Blackburn mentioned casually that he had picked up for a few shillings in Florence. It was all very pleasant, and very restful. The only unrestful sound in the room was Henderson’s voice.

“…so I told our young friend that he was on a wild-goose chase, but he was so
anxious
to consult you, Michael, because he had heard that you were
the
authority on Martin Rawlings –”

“And how does Miss Cleverly come into this?”

Miss Cleverly spoke truculently: “I took Mr Shelton to see a friend of mine named Arthur Jebb. He believes that this so-called first edition is a forgery.”

“Jebb?” Blackburn said, and raised his eyebrows.

“Somebody of
no
importance – a literary journalist, Michael.” Henderson giggled and straightened his tie. “But now we have come to the fountain-head.”

“Are you an expert on nineteenth-century literature, Miss Cleverly?”

“Not at all. Don’t claim to be. I know something about production, made a special study of the nineteenth century, that’s all.” It seemed to Anthony that Blackburn and Ruth were like two cautious fencers.

“That is most interesting.” The light shone on Blackburn’s halo of grey hair. “I myself can lay claim only to amateur status.” He waved away Henderson’s protest. “I am not being modest. I am merely expressing my incapacity for the kind of pertinacious scholarship that is becoming fashionable nowadays. I am also a little doubtful of its use. You place a piece of paper under a magnifying glass, you subject a book to a test like a piece of litmus paper, and then you pronounce, like Jove, your verdict. Those are your Mr Jebb’s methods, are they not? He has been in touch with me – a tiresome fellow. Forgive me if I cannot believe that the literary critic needs to wear the deerstalker of Sherlock Holmes. No doubt I am growing old.” He paused. “And I am certainly digressing unforgivably.”

Henderson broke in like the tide rushing up the shore. “Miss Cleverly here said Jebb thought the type face too
modern
.”

Ruth said vaguely, “Not quite right for 1860.”

The copy of
Passion and Repentance
was a blue spot on the oak table in the middle of the room. Blackburn picked it up and looked at it. “Delightful poems. He never wrote as well again,” he said, and then remarked, with the gentlest scorn,
“Not quite right for 1860.
How I envy Mr Jebb his ability to make such a claim with such confidence.”

Anthony was following it all with a puzzled stare. “He seemed very certain –”

“I’m sure he did,” Blackburn responded with a sigh. “What a pleasure it is to see a man so full of certainty in this normally dubious world. It happens that Mr Jebb is known to me and that we maintained for some little time a correspondence about other Victorian first editions, in which he has shown the same enviable certainty that they are forgeries. Unfortunately, I have not been able to agree with his conclusions. I think he ignores the healthy wood in his frantic search for individual dead trees. I regard him, in fact, as a crank.” Miss Cleverly moved slightly, and Blackburn said even more gently: “But, as I say, I speak as an amateur. In that capacity, Mr Shelton, I am not competent to answer abstruse queries about the particular year in which a typeface was introduced. I am a literary critic, and not a compositor. The point about the publisher’s name is a curious one, but I do not feel that it is incapable –”

Again Henderson rushed in. “I’m surprised you didn’t notice that yourself, Michael, for you know you really
are
being modest. I mean you
do
know an awful lot about Martin Rawlings’ work, don’t you?”

With a condescension that was becoming slightly strained, Blackburn said, “You are too kind, Stuart. But it happens that a copy of this charming first edition is not in my possession.”

“But you
had
one, hadn’t you – because you showed it to me once.”

There was a pause. Blackburn’s hands were clasped together tightly. Knotted and lined, they were the hands of an old man. When he spoke, his voice was as gentle as ever. “I had a copy, true. I sold it about a year ago, when a bookseller made what seemed a rather extravagantly good offer for it.”

“What bookseller?” Miss Cleverly asked bluntly, and Blackburn frowned slightly although his voice, when he spoke, was unchanged.

“I believe they are a long-established firm. Their name is Lewis & Son, and they are situated at Blackheath.”

“Good
Lord!
” Anthony said, emerging suddenly from a kind of waking sleep. He showed Blackburn the letter he had received that morning. “Isn’t that odd?”

“Not, perhaps, as odd as you think. It is very possible that Lewis’s act for two or three collectors of Martin Rawlings’ work. I assume from the presence of this little book that you have decided not to sell.”

“I’ve refused this offer. But I don’t see that I could accept it, anyway, until I know if this is genuine, and worth that much money.”

Blackburn smiled charmingly. “Such scruples do you credit. But you need have no doubts on that score. If Mr Jebb had been less concerned with proving a case, he might have found time for some commonplace, and not excessively fatiguing, investigations into literary history, which would have shown him that he was on a wrong track.” He went to the shelves and took down a book. “This is
Sesame Without Lilies,
a small collection of my own essays, published in 1905. Perhaps I may read you a page or two from one of them. It is called ‘A Turbulent Boy’, and is a brief biography of Martin Rawlings. I shall not need to weary you with more than a page or two.”