Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (15 page)

‘You fool!’ said Varvara. ‘That is how my uncle meant you to think. Also the judges if I had died. Did you not once tell me that here they will not execute people of less than eighteen?’

There was, I think, a faint tinge of authentic paranoia in her make-up. It came out in the awful ingenuity with which she could sweep up undoubted facts and marshal them to support some crazy theory.

Although I had not much faith in the power of reason, I carefully went through the main points which seemed to me to show that there could have been no design on Cedric’s part.

First, the occasion for going to the museum had not been engineered by him. The pigeon had been responsible, and not even Varvara could suppose that the birds were in his pay.

Second, it was absolutely contrary to what we knew of the relationship between him and his daughter to suppose that he would make her his agent for murder; he scarcely trusted her to do up her own shoelaces. Nor did her private behaviour suggest that she was a devoted child, willing to pull his chestnuts out of the fire; she was far more likely to blab.

Third, I did not believe that if the dart had entered Varvara’s scalp she would necessarily have died. I believe it is true that curare keeps its strength far longer than most vegetable poisons. All the same Cedric grossly exaggerated its longevity. The impregnated dart had been lying about for years, exposed to air and dust. Subsequent expert advice confirms that at most it was only likely to make a healthy girl uncomfortably ill.

On the last point, of course, it could probably well be replied that Cedric did not realize that the method he employed was chemically inefficient. In general the force of my arguments was diminished by the fact that I could not honestly pretend that I thought him to be incapable of murder. The best I could say was that on the particular facts of the case I acquitted him.

‘You talk about the difference between Doljuk and England,’ I wound up. ‘But I don’t believe that even in Doljuk people go about trying to slaughter each other by these fantastic tricks.’

Alas, I should have stuck to what I knew. Varvara was ready for me with chapter and verse from the endless chronicle of Turkestanian barbarity.

‘Ishak Toghrul tied a mule’s rein round his brother’s neck and whipped it up so that it strangled him. Fatima Meng, the wife of the apricot-seller, pushed her husband’s concubine down a well on account of the jewellery. Stefan Yefrimovitch Hamin, the refugee from Russia, took a hot iron—’

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Please, stop. Perhaps Doljuk is everything that you say. The point is that, whatever you believe about your uncle, you’ve got to keep your mouth shut. Otherwise you’ll be playing into his hands.’

‘How?’

‘If you make a public accusation against him, he can take legal steps to restrain you. And they’ll be successful. In England people just won’t believe such charges against wealthy and influential citizens.’

‘Would not the police?’

‘They’d be more concerned to protect him than you.’

‘Then,’ said Varvara solemnly, ‘I must make my own law and pass my own judgment.’

As I left her room the thing happened which I had long been fearing. I put out my hand for the electric switch, but before I touched it there was the sound of a door shutting and the light sprang up from the other end of the landing. Nurse Fillis came towards me from the lavatory.

As we drew abreast, she stopped and stared.

‘Well, Mr. Lindley . . .’ she said meaningly.

‘Good night, Nurse.’

‘I saw where you came from.’

‘Really?’

‘It was out of Miss Ellison’s room. You can’t fool me.’

‘Even if there was anything to fool you about, I shouldn’t trouble. You see, I know you wouldn’t throw stones.’

Nurse Fillis’s face darkened with embarrassment and anger. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Only that you also have your tender moments.’

‘Blackmail won’t get you anywhere.’

‘So long as that’s realized on both sides . . .’

It occurred to me that it might be better to drop the irony and end the scene on a bluffer note, showing how lightly I regarded the whole incident.

‘Run along,’ I said, ‘if you want to get down those stairs in one piece.’

Her room was on the floor below. I merely meant that the time switch would again shortly plunge us into darkness. But when I saw the alarm on her face and the way she scurried off I realized that she had put a different interpretation on my words. At the time I was amused.

10

At the period of which I am writing, it was unusual for rich people to spend August in London, unless, like Mrs. Ellison, they were not fit to travel. Andrew was not a positive exception to this rule: he merely interpreted it to suit his own essentially urban nature. From Monday to Friday morning he was at his father’s flat in Park Lane: but over the long weekend he went down to a village near Henley where he shared a bungalow with several friends.

I knew quite a lot about this resort, since it had often figured in the world-weary conversations at Cambridge with which he broke his ascent to the rooms above mine. So many of the things about which he would issue languid warnings seemed to happen there. It must have been quite a big place, for I never exhausted the list of Andrew’s co-tenants—though this was no doubt partly due to the rapidity with which they changed. I had a confused impression of numerous young women guests changing partners, as in a ballet, to the accompaniment of a cricket-like noise of bickering.

Nurse Fillis and I were unexpectedly alone at lunch on the last Saturday in August.

‘I’m afraid it’s going to be rather a disappointing weekend for you, Mr. Lindley,’ she said roguishly.

‘Oh? Why?’

‘Well, you won’t like being alone, will you? Or perhaps you will, though I don’t suppose you dare admit it!’

‘I’m afraid you’re being too deep for me again.’

‘Miss Ellison’s taken herself off.’ She paused significantly. ‘For the night. But I expect you knew.’

‘I didn’t, as it happens.’

‘She has her grandmother’s permission. I’m sure I hope the old lady knew what she was doing.’ Another dramatic pause. ‘An awfully nice-looking young fellow called for her in a great big red car. . . . It looked as if you could almost lie down in the back.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We shall have to console each other.’

I could see her toying for a moment with the notion that I meant it. Then experience led her to conclude, quite rightly, that this was only another example of my trivial irony.

‘It’s a funny thing about me, but I only like men much older than myself. I don’t know what it is . . .’

‘Gerontophilia.’

‘Pardon?’

‘That’s what it is. Look it up in the text-books next time you go to a dance at the Hunterian Museum.’

So another skirmish ended in open dudgeon.

Nevertheless Nurse Fillis had scored her point—or rather two points. I did not like the idea of Varvara staying at Andrew’s riparian monkey-house; nor did I believe that Mrs. Ellison would have allowed her to do so, if she had had any notion what kind of things went on there. She belonged to the age of the chaperone—a role which, so far as it existed in Andrew’s circle, tended to be taken over by any girl who had temporarily chased herself off the
champs d’amour
with a gin-bottle.

Varvara, I learnt, had said that she would be back in time for dinner on Sunday. But ten o’clock had struck before she reappeared—and then her lateness was the least of the things which needed explanation. She had a large black eye, and her frock had been ripped across on one side from the V of the neck to the armhole, and was held together only by safety-pins.

The car which brought her back was certainly not the luxurious sin-chariot of Nurse Fillis’s description. It was a battered old Ford driven by a strange man in dungarees. In it also rode Andrew. He came up the steps with Varvara, limping heavily. As soon as the door was opened and he saw me standing in the hall, he said in a petulant voice:

‘All right, David, all right. I know! But before you say your piece, do you mind if I just staunch some of this blood, and wash off the spilt brains?’

In addition to the foot injury he had a long strip of sticking plaster across his right temple.

I turned to Varvara. ‘We had an accident,’ she explained. ‘Near Slough two lorries driven by Bolsheviks would not come apart for us.’

A few further questions elicited that they had tried to pass one big commercial vehicle whilst another was approaching from the opposite direction. The main road was in those days dangerously narrow and they had torn off the front wing of their Bugatti against the oncoming van. Then they had skidded and fetched up with a smart bang against a suburban tree.

Considering what might have happened they had got off very lightly. Both Varvara’s and Andrew’s injuries were superficial; although she had ripped her dress whilst being catapulted out through a broken door. Apparently the third passenger had not been damaged at all.

‘By the way, who was that?’

‘He is a Count,’ replied Varvara. ‘A friend of Andrew’s.’

Andrew emerged from the cloakroom and went out to pay the garage man who had brought them home. Rejoining us in the hall, he addressed Varvara:

‘You’d better go and put some raw steak on that eye if you want it to be presentable for Molly Saxby’s party.’

When she was out of earshot I said:

‘So the great Tino let you in for this?’

‘Not entirely.’

Constantine Omolgon, styling himself Count, was an undergraduate at Cambridge, though rather older than most. He was a Phanariote Greek who claimed that his family title dated back to the days of the Byzantine Empire. Omolgon, he would explain, came from a Greek word which means ‘he who confesses’; and an ancestor had been so called because, when captured by heathens, he ‘confessed’, or refused to deny, his religion and his emperor. For this, in Constantine’s own arch phraseology, he was deprived of a great part of his happiness. Many people thought it was a pity that his misfortune occurred only after he had begotten an heir.

I could never understand why Andrew made friends with a man whose faults were a parody of his own. Omolgon cultivated an exaggerated worldliness and knowledgeability and he also had a great reputation for courtly gallantry in the Latin style—which, I’m afraid, always reminds me of a monkey with its top half dressed in satins but the basic ape peeping out below.

Outside the boudoir his favourite amusement was driving sports cars at reckless speeds. I knew for a fact that he had been involved in several accidents during the past two years. Hence my surprise at Andrew’s partial disclaimer.

‘ “Not entirely”? Do you mean the lorry-man was to blame?’

‘No,’ said Andrew, ‘but Tino wasn’t in charge. He merely made a rather ill-judged grab for the brake at a crucial moment. Otherwise I think we should have got through.’

‘Were you driving?’

‘No.’

‘Then . . . my God! . . .’

‘It’s all right,’ said Andrew. ‘I bought her a licence the other day. She’s really amazingly good, if you could only make her take her foot off the accelerator. Tino thinks she’ll end at Brooklands.’

‘Brookwood you mean—in the cemetery! Honestly, Andrew, I realized you were pretty callous, but I’d have thought you’d hesitate before putting an exhibitionist girl with a bullock-cart-and-pony background at the wheel of a racing car. And on a main road!’

‘I gave her lessons,’ said Andrew sheepishly. ‘She seemed to be getting on so well.’

‘Couldn’t you damn well see that if you drove at seventy-five miles an hour it would be a point of honour with Varvara to touch eighty?’

‘Anyway,’ said Andrew, ‘no serious harm’s done. It’s just a matter between me and my insurance.’

‘That won’t wash. How am I to know you won’t succeed in killing her next time? It so happens that I really mind about Varvara.’

‘So do I, old boy.’

I noted with a wry pleasure that even in my own ears (which were apt to be hypercritical on such occasions) my protestation rang with the greater fervour. In it was the inimitable note of calf-love; whereas Andrew could not help sounding like an amiable veal-butcher.

I took him into the dining-room and gave him several large glasses of claret and soda. Unfortunately drink again raised my moral blood-pressure.

‘And that damned bogus Count! Do you honestly think he’s the sort of person to unleash on a girl who’s come practically out of an Asiatic purdah?’

‘She showed every sign of being able to cope. In fact we had a laugh about the way she capped Tino’s pet build-up.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you know he tends to go on about the glories of the Omolgon family.’

‘Do I not!’

‘Just when we were all getting a bit sick of it, Varvara casually mentioned that her father had been made a prince.’

‘A prince! She said that?’

‘Perhaps she hadn’t told you, old boy,’ said Andrew, ‘but apparently the locals gave him a handle which adds up to roughly that. Of course it was only a wog title, but still . . .’

‘This,’ I said in a voice trembling with moral rectitude, ‘has got to be stopped.’

Andrew sighed and put down his glass. For a moment I comprehended that beneath all the pretension and the ‘gamesmanship’ he was genuinely a person who had matured much younger than the average; and one who had already enjoyed certain glimpses of the obvious, from which I was still separated by a decade.

‘God forbid,’ he said, ‘that we should start swapping home-truths. I don’t feel equal to it. But you ought to watch out, David. When you find something the way you like it you want to keep it on ice, just so, for ever. That doesn’t work with people. They can’t help moving on. Varvara is moving on. She’s come into a new world, as you’re so fond of pointing out, and she’s a stranger in it. But she doesn’t bloody well want to stay strange. She’s out to make her number, to be a roaring success. If you try to freeze her as your pet Chinese curio, just one thing will happen.’

‘What?’ I asked in spite of myself.

‘She’ll move on,’ said Andrew briefly. ‘Of course that may happen in any case. Good night.’

My indignation was still hot when I next saw Varvara.

‘Greeting, your Royal Highness.’

‘It was a joke.’

‘I wonder! In any case you shouldn’t play jokes until you can gauge their effect.’

‘It is true,’ she said, shifting her ground, ‘that my father was titled by the citizens of Doljuk.’

‘I know. They made him an
aksakal,
the equivalent of a town councillor. Princess, indeed! I suppose you thought you were improving your social status, but here the only people who tell that sort of lie are lunatics and broken-down night-club tarts with a White Russian background.’

I spoke even more savagely than usual in our quarrels. I was sincerely shocked not by romantic lies told for self-aggrandizement, but by the fact that in stooping to this particular vice she seemed to have betrayed so many of the foundations of her character—the directness, the self-sufficiency, the readiness to face the world alone. She had put herself in the position of pleading for Andrew’s friends to honour her with their approval.

She must have felt some justice in my rebuke, for she did not retaliate in her normal spirited fashion. She said nothing. The effect was rather disconcerting: it left my outburst suspended in mid-air. In order to re-establish contact on the normal plane I asked her some question about the tenure of office by the
aksakals
in Doljuk and their powers.

‘Doljuk!’ she said, not angry, but mocking. ‘Doljuk! Always Doljuk! Soon, as you go on learning and I begin to forget, it will become your city more than mine, and I shall be questioning you about it.’

‘I’ve no wish to steal your legitimate thunder,’ I said.

Varvara replied: ‘I shall not judge against you for it, David. You are happier when you can receive a piece of your life from books or the mouth of another. It is so much easier to be the master of events when they are set before you as stiff and cold as corpses.’

She smiled at me with friendly malice. We were equal again.

I was on my way down to spend part of a wet afternoon in Turpin’s pantry when I heard him below me ushering somebody into the hall. A few moments later I was passed on the stairs by a small, grey-haired man, wearing a monocle. He gave me a smile but went on without speaking. When I reached the pantry I inquired about the visitor.

‘Mr. Pyne,’ said Turpin gloomily. ‘Lawyer. “ ’Ow now thou secret black and midnight ’ag?” ’

This was not a fair description. Mr. Pyne came again next day and whilst he was waiting in the morning-room we talked for a while. He struck me as a sensible, balanced man, and learning that I meant to enter his profession, he threw off some
obiter dicta
about it which remain in my mind as valuable advice.

By himself I would have relied on him to give Mrs. Ellison honest and equitable guidance. But doubts crept in when he let slip that his visit had been timed to coincide with one from Uncle Cedric. It might be too much to expect him to oppose an enormously valuable client in a matter of whose rights and wrongs he could not be sure.

Presumably he had come about Mrs. Ellison’s will. In theory he might be required to make some alteration in Varvara’s favour; but unhappily the opposite seemed more probable—if only because of the indications that Cedric welcomed his appearance. It looked as if the long campaign of attrition had at last succeeded.

Varvara, needless to say, had spontaneously arrived at the same conclusion. The natural prompting of her mind told her that any move was for the worse. Again I had a tremendous battle to prevent her from going to her grandmother and demanding the right to state her case. I knew from my own experience that, however justifiable such conduct, it would simply outrage Mrs. Ellison.

With the soft approach of night she became more reconciled to her injuries and even began to enjoy their pathetic flavour. As we sat on her bed drinking a bottle of white wine provided by Turpin, she said:

‘Soon my grandmother will die, and I shall be left alone in this country. I shall starve.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Perhaps—but only because I shall go on the streets first.’ She repeated the phrase with relish, adding: ‘In my good new clothes. My grandmother’s ghost will come up behind me, grieving and repenting in the cold.’

‘And interfering considerably with business, I should think.’

She threw one of the pillows at me. Then reluctantly she began to laugh. Her self-pity did not go very deep; it sprang from a liking for drama rather than a genuine introversion of the heart.

Whatever the reasons for Mr. Pyne’s visits, I had scarcely expected a third. Probably, however, the will was only one of many matters affecting Mrs. Ellison’s vast estate which intermittently needed legal attention.

In his quiet way the solicitor had impressed me as a man who would not be put on. Cedric had been very late for the previous meeting. Accordingly I was not much surprised when at three o’clock I found him tramping up and down the morning-room, looking at his watch.

‘Damn fellow!’ he muttered. ‘I told him quarter to.’

‘I dare say he’s been held up by some other business.’

‘In that case,’ said Cedric unpleasantly, ‘perhaps I ought to consider freeing him from any trivial commissions that I can put into his hands. Do you know what my father used to say?’ He quoted: ‘ “Never let an attorney forget that he may drive the coach, but the master’s the man who sits inside.” ’

Old Joe’s epigram seemed to have the rapier-like point of a tent-peg.

‘Very crisp,’ I said politely.