Ivy Tree (7 page)

"After she'd gone," said Lisa Dermott, "Con remembered me. She said it quite simply. There was no hint of self-pity or complaint in the soft, flattened voice. I looked down at her, sitting stolid and unattractive in the old basket chair, and said gently:. "He got Mr. Winslow to send for you?"

She nodded. "Someone had to run the house, and it seemed too good a chance to miss. But even with the two of us there, doing all that we do, it's not the slightest use."

The impulse of pity that had stirred in me, died without a pang. I had a sudden vivid picture of the two of them, camped there at Whitescar, hammering home their claims, Con with his charm and industry, Lisa with her polish and her apple pies ... She had called it 'unfair', and perhaps it was; certainly one must admit they had a right to a point of view. But then so had Matthew Winslow.

"You see," she said, "how unjust it all is? You do see that, don't you?"

"Yes, I see. But I still don't see what you think I can do about it! You want me to go to Whitescar, and somehow or other that is going to help Con to become the heir, and owner. How?" I had left the window as I spoke, and come forward to the table again. I saw that fugitive look of excitement touch her face once more as she leaned towards me, looking up under the brim of the brown hat.

"You're interested now, aren't you? I thought you would be, when you heard a bit more."

"I'm not. You've got me wrong. I was interested in your story, I admit, but that was because I think your brother may be right when he says I must come originally from some branch of the same family. But I never said I was interested in your proposition ! I'm not! I told you what I thought about it! It's a crazy idea straight out of nineteenth-century romance, long-lost heirs and missing wills and—and all that drivel!" I found that I was speaking roughly, almost angrily, and made myself smile at her, adding, mildly enough:

"You'll be telling me next that Annabel had a strawberry-mark—" I stopped. Her hand had moved, quickly, to the telephone directory on the table beside her. I saw, then, that I had shut it over a pencil which still lay between the leaves.

The book fell open under her hand, at the page headed "Wilson—Winthorpe". She looked at it without expression.

Then her blunt, well-kept finger moved down towards the foot of the second column, and stopped there.

" Winslow, Matthew. Frmr. Whitescar . ?. . Betlingham 248."

The entry was marked, faintly, in pencil.

I said, trying to keep my voice flat, and only succeeding in making it sound sulky: "Yes, I looked it up. It puzzled me, because your brother had said he owned the farm. It isn't an old directory, so when you first spoke of 'the old man', I assumed he must have died quite recently." She didn't answer. She shut the book, then leaned back in her chair and looked up at me, with that calm, appraising look. I met it almost defiantly.

"All right, I was interested before. Who wouldn't be? After that business on Sunday . . . oh, well, skip it. Call it curiosity if you like, I'm only human. But my heaven, there's no reason why it should go further than curiosity! This—proposition—you appear to be suggesting, takes my breath away. No, no, I don't want to hear any more about it. I can't even believe you're serious. Are you?"

"Quite."

"Very well. But can you give me any conceivable reason why /should be?" She looked at me almost blankly. There it was again; that merciless all-excluding obsession with their personal problems. "I don't understand."

I found that I was reaching, automatically, for another cigarette. I let it slip back into the packet. I had smoked too much that evening already; my eyes and throat felt hot and aching, and my brain stupid. I said:

"Look, you approach me out of the blue with your family history, which may be intriguing, but which can really mean very little to me. You propose, let's face it, that somehow or other I should help you to perpetrate a fraud. It may mean everything to you; I don't see how, but we'll grant it for argument's sake. But why should it mean a thing to me? You tell me it'll be 'easy*. Why should I care? Why should I involve myself? In plain words, why on earth should I go out of my way to help you and your brother Con to anything?"

I didn't add: "When I don't much like you, and I don't trust him," but to my horror the words seemed to repeat themselves into the air of the room as clearly as if I, and not the tone of my voice, had said them. If she heard them, she may have been too unwilling to antagonise me, to resent them. Nor did she appear to mind my actual rudeness. She said, simply: "Why, for money, of course? What other reason is there?"

"For money V

She gave a slight, summing, eloquent glance round the room. "If you'll forgive me, you appear to need it. You said so, in fact to my brother; that was one of the reasons why we felt we could approach you. You have so much to gain. You will forgive my speaking so plainly on such a short acquaintance?"

"Do," I said ironically.

"You are a gentlewoman," said Miss Dermott, the outmoded sounding perfectly normal on her lips. "And this room . . . and your job at that dreadful cafe . . . You've been over here from Canada for how long?"

"Just a few days."

"And this has been all you could find?"

"As far as I looked. It took all I had to get me here. I'm marking time while I get my bearings. I took the first thing that came. You don't have to worry about me, Miss Dermott. I'll make out. I don't have to work in the Kasbah for life, you know."

"All the same," she said, "it's worth your while to listen to me. In plain terms, I'm offering you a job, a good one, the job of coming back to Whitescar as Annabel Winslow, and persuading the old man that that is who you are. You will have a home and every comfort, a position, everything; and eventually a small assured income for life. You call it a fraud: of course it is, but it's not a cruel one. The old man wants you there, and your coming will make him very happy."

"Why did he remove the photographs?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said earlier that he used to keep a 'whole gallery' of this girl's photographs in his room. Doesn't he still?"

"You're very quick." She sounded appreciative, as of a favourite horse who was showing a pretty turn of speed. "He didn't get rid of them, don't worry; he keeps them in a drawer in his office, and he still has one in his bedroom. He moved the others last year, when he had one done of Julie." She eyed me for a moment.

"She'll be coming up for her summer holiday before very long. You see?"

"I see why you and your brother might want to work quickly, yes."

"Of course. You must come home before Julie persuades him to be reasonable about Annabel's death . . . and to put Julie herself in Annabel's place. Whatever happens, it'll happen soon. It's doubtful if the old man'll see the year out, and I think he's beginning to realise it."

I looked up quickly. "Is he ill?"

"He had a slight stroke three months ago, and he refuses to take very much care. He's always been strong and very active, and he seems to resent any suggestion that he should do less. He takes it as an encroachment . . ." Her lips tightened over whatever she had been going to say, then she added: "The doctor has warned him. He may live for some time, but he may, if he does anything silly, have another stroke at almost any moment and this time it might be fatal. So you see why this is so urgent? Why meeting you like that seemed, to Con, like a gift from heaven?"

I said, after a pause: "And when he's gone?"

She said patiently: "It's all thought out. We can go into details later. Briefly, all you have to do is to establish yourself at Whitescar, be Annabel Winslow, and inherit the property (and her share of the capital) when the old man dies. I tell you, there'll be no question. Don't you see, you'll not actually be coming back to claim anything, simply coming home to live? With luck you'll be able to settle quietly in and establish yourself, long before there's any sort of crisis, and by the time the old man does die, you'll have been accepted without question. Then, after a decent interval, when things seem settled, you'll turn over your legacy to Con. You'll get your cut, don't worry. Annabel's mother left her some money, which she could have claimed when she was twenty-one; it brings in a nice little independent income. You'll have that—in any case, it would look absurd if you attempted to hand that over. As for the main transaction, the handing over of Whitescar, that can be arranged to look normal enough. You can say you want to live elsewhere . .

. abroad, perhaps . . . whatever you'd planned for yourself. In fact, you'll be able to lead your own life again, but with a nice little assured income behind you. And if 'Annabel' decided to live away from Whitescar again, leaving the place to her cousin, who's run it for years anyway, there's no reason why anyone should question it," "The young cousin? Julie?"

"I tell you, you needn't be afraid of her. Her step-father has money, there's no other child, and she'll certainly also get a share of Mr. Winslow's capital. You'll rob her of Whitescar, yes, but she's never given the slightest hint that she cares anything about it, except as a place to spend a holiday in. Since she left school last year, she's taken a job in London, in the Drama Department at the B.B.C., and she's only been up here once, for the inside of a fortnight. All she could do, if the place was hers, would be to sell it, or pay Con to manage it. You needn't have Julie on your conscience."

"But surely—" it was absurd, I thought, to feel as if one was being backed against a wall by this steady pressure of will—"But surely, if the old man realised that he was ill, and still Annabel hadn't come back, he would leave things to Con? Or if he left them to Julie, and she was content to let Con go on as manager, wouldn't that be all right?"

Her lips folded in that soft obstinate line. "That wouldn't answer. Can't you see how impossible—ah, well, take it from me that it wouldn't work out like that. No, my dear, this is the best way, and you're the gift straight from the gods. Con believes he'll never get control of Whitescar and the capital except this way. When you've said you'll help, I'll explain more fully, and you'll see what a chance it is for all of us, and no harm done, least of all to that stubborn old man sitting at Whitescar waiting for her to come home..." Somehow, without wanting it, I had taken the cigarette, my hands fidgeting with carton and lighter in spite of myself. I stood silently while she talked, looking about me through the first, blue, sharp-scented cloud of smoke . . . the sagging bed, the purplish wallpaper, the wardrobe and dressing-chest of yellow deal, the table-cloth with the geometric flowers of Prussian blue and carmine, and the stain on the ceiling that was the shape of the map of Ireland. I thought of the high moors and the curlews calling and the beeches coming into leaf in the windbreaks. And of the collie-dog waving his tail, and the straight blue stare of Connor Winslow...

It was disconcerting to feel the faint prickle of nervous excitement along the skin, the ever-so-slightly quickened heartbeat, the catch in the breath. Because of course the thing was crazy. Dangerous and crazy and impossible. This silly, stolid pudding of a woman couldn't possibly have realised how crazy it was .. . No, I thought. No. Go while the going's good. Don't touch it.

"Well?" said Lisa Dermott.

I went to the window and dragged the curtains shut across it. I turned abruptly back to her. The action was somehow symbolic; it shut us in together, story-book conspirators in the solitary, sleazy upstairs room that smelt of too much cigarette-smoke.

"Well?" I echoed her, sharply. "All right. I am interested. And I'll come, if you can persuade me that it can possibly work ... Go on. I'll really listen now."

Or take me by the body so meek, Follow, my love, come over the strand—

And throw me in the water so deep, For I dare na go back to Northumberland. 

Ballad: The Fair Flower of Northumberland.

IT took three weeks. At the end of that time Lisa Dermott vowed that I would do. There was nothing, she said, that she or Con knew about Whitescar and Annabel that I, too, didn't now know. My handwriting, even, passed muster. The problem of the signature had been one of Lisa's worst worries, but she had brought me some old letters, written before Annabel's disappearance, and when I showed her the sheets that I had covered with carefully-practised writing, she eventually admitted that they would pass.

"After all, Lisa—" I used Christian names for her and Con, and made a habit of referring to Matthew Winslow as "Grandfather"—"I shan't be doing much writing. The person who matters is Grandfather, and I shan't have to write to him. As, far as the bank's concerned, the signature is all that's needed, and I've got that off pretty well, you must admit. In any case, even a signature might change a bit in eight years; it'll be easy enough to account for any slight differences, one would think." We were in another boarding-house room, this time in a big house in the tangle of busy streets east of the Haymarket. I had left my previous lodgings the day after my first meeting with Lisa, and, on her recommendation, had taken this room under the name of Winslow.

"Because," said Lisa, "though I don't imagine for a moment that anyone will see us together who knows me, or knew Annabel, if they should happen to see us before you turn up at Whitescar, or if they do make inquiries, at least they won't find that Lisa Dermott and Con Winslow were seeing an awful lot of one Mary Grey just before 'Annabel' turned up at home to eat the fatted calf."

"You seem awfully sure of that fatted calf," I said drily. "Let's hope you're right. You'll have to be completely honest with me, both of you, about Grandfather's reactions when he gets the news I'm coming. If he seems to have the slightest suspicion of a doubt—and if he so much as mentions having me investigated —you're to tell me, and—"

"We'll think again, that's understood. You don't imagine we'd be too keen on an investigation, either? We'll look after you, you know. We have to. It cuts both ways."

I laughed: "Don't think I haven't realised that I The possibilities for mutual blackmail are unlimited, and quite fascinating."