The China Governess (7 page)

‘Oh, I imagine she was young and beautiful and intelligent in the box, you know,' Toberman said. ‘She insisted that the thing was an accident and of course, if it hadn't been for the letters and the motive the man had given her by his boasting, it could easily have been one. What a splendidly unhealthy atmosphere there must have been in that schoolroom, eh Campion?'

‘Fearful. Why did she kill herself?'

‘No future.' Toberman's shrug lent a chill to the statement. ‘She came out of the assize court, drifted down the high road, found she had nowhere to go and pitched herself in a horsepond. There was nothing left for her at all, you see. The Victorians didn't waste time and money getting discredited people to write newspaper confessions, and as an ex-employer old Terence Kinnit wouldn't have stirred a finger. Kinnit philanthropy always has an end product.'

The bitterness of the sneer in the hitherto casual voice was so unexpected that it sounded like a snarl in the quiet room. Mr. Campion stared at the speaker through his round spectacles. Toberman laughed, his full mouth disconcertingly unsteady and reproachful.

‘I'm the first of my family not to be grateful,' he announced. ‘I used to be an angry young man and now I'm a moaning middle-aged one. I'm the last of the Tobermans and the first of them to see
the Kinnits for what they must have been all the time – a bunch of natural sharks masquerading as patronizing amateurs.' He broke off abruptly. ‘What I need is a drink,' he said. ‘Whenever I get unpleasantly sober I clamber up on this boring old hobby horse. The Kinnits are a depressing family. Old Terence must have been typical. He got my great-grandfather out of his particular spot of bother. They used to spell bankrupt b . . . . . . t in those days and he lent his name and a great deal of his money to our Auction Rooms. We remained the auctioneers and the Kinnits kept their amateur status as connoisseurs who did a spot of genteel dealing on the side. That's the Kinnit method; take in lame ducks, don't ask too much about them but make devoted slaves of them ever after. Old Terence hadn't asked for any reference when he took Thyrza on; that too emerged at the trial. She asked very little and he was sorry for her. You can hear every Kinnit who ever lived in that little phrase.'

Mr. Campion turned away idly from the china cabinet and allowed his attention to be caught by a collection of enamelled buttons displayed in a glass-topped table little bigger than a dinner plate. When he spoke his tone was casual but the listening Julia, who had only his voice to go upon, realized that he had at last perceived the opening for which he had been waiting.

‘Which gets under your skin most? The patronage or the amateurism?' he inquired with misleading fatuity.

‘The ruddy wealth!' said Toberman, speaking the truth and being amused by it. ‘Terence Kinnit spent a fortune ruining this place in the biggest possible way – he panelled quite two square miles of wall space with pseudo-Tudor plywood for one thing – but it didn't break him as it ought to have done, because he was able to pay for the lot by instructing us to auction off just a portion of the magnificent stuff he found and recognized in the ruins. The original builders had not only imported their skilled labour from Italy but their “garden ornaments” as well. Classic marbles, old boy, which are now in half the museums in Europe. No one recognized them but Terence. I've never forgiven his ghost for that!' He took a deep breath and his dark eyes were briefly ingenuous. ‘And why did he do it in the first place?' he demanded.
‘All because some silly little bit he'd taken into his house “out of generosity because she was cheap” had got him into a scandal which had to be smoke-screened. He bought the local folly and turned it into a palace to give the neighbours something else to talk about!' He grinned and his sophistication returned. ‘You think I've got a chip on my shoulder don't you? Well, so I have, and let me tell you I've got a cracking great right to it.'

Mr. Campion coughed apologetically. ‘I do beg your pardon,' he said hastily. ‘I had no idea you felt so strongly. I imagined that as you spent so much time at the Well House that you. . . .'

‘Thought myself one of them?' Toberman sounded both irritated and ashamed. ‘I do, I suppose, when I'm
not
thinking. I like old Eustace. I ought to. The man has behaved like a rich uncle to me ever since I remember. Both he and Alison treat me as if I were a nephew and I use the Town house whenever I want to. Why shouldn't I? Everybody else has. They've got a South African relation there now. . . . a humourless woman cousin and her female help. I've been “taken-in-and-done-for” like the rest of the outfit and I happen to resent it whilst being too darn lazy to do anything about it. Yet the whole thing is a paradox, because if anyone has a right to inherit from the Kinnits I have. At least I'm not a stray.' Again the bitterness behind the contradictory outburst was quite remarkable. He noticed it himself for he flushed and smiled disarmingly.

‘Do I talk too much because I drink too much or the other way round? I never know,' he said hastily. ‘We'll go and hunt up some liquor in a moment. There usually is some alcohol concealed upon the premises if one organizes a search. Forgive me Campion, but I'm still reeling under the shock of a discovery I ought to have made twenty years ago. When it came to me the other day I was knocked out, not by its staggering obviousness, but by the fact that I of all people was the one person who knew about it and yet hadn't recognized it in all that time. Hang it all, I saw it happen!'

It was obvious, both to Mr. Campion and to Julia still concealed upon the other side of the room, that he was about to make a confidence and also that it was one he had become in the habit of making recently.

‘It was when the rumour first broke that young Timothy had landed the Laurell girl,' he announced devastatingly. ‘I don't know why, but that got me down in a very big way. Why should a man who is darn lucky to inherit one fortune suddenly have the nerve to marry another? I was thinking about the unfairness of it all when the blinding truth about that young man suddenly hit me between the eyes. Tell me, Campion, you're a knowledgeable chap, who do you think he is?

‘Eustace Kinnit's adopted son.' Mr. Campion spoke cautiously, but Julia could hear that he was interested.

‘Everybody knows that, but you assumed he was also his own natural son, didn't you? Either his own or his brother's, the original Timothy's? Everybody has always thought that.'

Mr. Campion said nothing.

‘Well, he wasn't,' said Toberman. ‘That's what Eustace let everyone believe, the romantic old so-and-so! That was the view of the whole of London and probably of the boy himself. Certainly that is what my old father thought. He told me about it before he died, as if it was some dreadful family secret, and I believed him, that was the extraordinary thing. I believed him although I was one who knew the truth if I'd been old enough to understand it then.' The expression on his highly coloured face was wondering. ‘Imagine that!' he said.

The thin man's pale eyes were misleadingly blank as he turned towards the speaker.

‘You suddenly remembered something about Tim Kinnit when you heard of the proposed engagement?' he inquired, leading him gently back to the main subject.

‘Yes.' The miraculous enlightenment of the moment of discovery was still fresh to Toberman. ‘I was having a drink with someone, Eckermann of the Brink Gallery as a matter of fact. He mentioned the engagement and referred to the adoption and asked me which of the Kinnit brothers the boy really belonged to. I said “Oh, the younger one, the Timothy who was killed in Spain” and Eckerman said “Then young Timothy must be considerably over twenty-two mustn't he?” This foxed me because I knew he wasn't, and for the first time I worked it out and I realized that
Timothy must have been born just about the beginning of the world war, long after the Spanish affair. And then I
was
puzzled because I could recall that year preceding the outbreak. I was ten and my people had the wind up after the Munich fiasco and I was pushed out of London and into the country down here. Eustace was ill. He was in hospital for seven or eight months and then he came down to recuperate. I remember him and I remember the war preparations here, the fire drill and the gas masks and the reception station for evacuees from the East End of London. Alison was in the thick of it – she would be! Eustace, being an invalid, pottered about in the library doing the paperwork and blubbing over the newspapers while I ran loose like a tolerated mongrel pup round his feet. As I was talking to Eckermann the other day I remembered an incident which had meant nothing to me as a child but which was, suddenly, utterly enlightening to my adult mind. The truth hit me like a bullet and I
knew
how young master Timothy, darling of all the Kinnits, Totham, Oxford, heiress-hunter and Success Boy came into the family. He was abandoned here by some slut of a slum mother, Campion. Eustace just scooped him up in a typically arrogant Kinnit way and gave him the name which happened to be uppermost in his mind – “Timothy Kinnit”, after his young brother killed in the Spanish war. After all it cost him nothing, and since the whole world was in flames at the time and no one's chances of survival were worth a damn he didn't appear to be risking very much.' All the jealousy and resentment of a lifetime flickered in the small brown eyes as he confronted the other man with the statement.

Mr. Campion's little laugh sounded scandalized.

‘Did you actually
say
this to Eckermann?' he inquired.

‘I did and I've no doubt he repeated it.' Toberman was defiant. ‘I may have told one or two other people as well, and I'm telling
you
now, aren't I? It probably is a silly thing to do but the whole idea has shaken me. I've known it, you understand, I've known it without knowing it all my life. Besides,' he added with an abrupt descent to the practical, ‘I don't envisage anybody serving me with a writ for slander, do you? It's true.'

‘Wouldn't you have a lot of difficulty proving it?'

‘I don't think so.' He was quietly obstinate. ‘The fact which misled everybody – the people like my father, for instance – was that the kid had a ration book and an identity card in the name “Timothy Kinnit” long before Eustace adopted him. I remember father commenting on it to Mama, and I remember not being able to understand what the hell they were getting at. It was only when I was talking to Eckermann that I suddenly remembered the incident which explains all that. One day just after the war started I was in the library across the corridor here, sitting on the floor looking at some back numbers of the
Sphere
I'd found, and Eustace was at the desk filling in what must have been the famous “Householder” form of 1939. It was the first census of its kind and it was on the information gathered by it that the identity cards were issued. Once you were on that form you had a right to live in Britain and it was made pretty clear that the converse applied. You were in the services, no doubt, but I wasn't. I remember it vividly.'

Mr. Campion nodded. He seemed afraid of breaking the flow but there was little chance of that.

‘Each householder in the entire country had to put down the name of every living soul who slept under his roof on a certain night,' Toberman said. ‘That was how the census was taken at such tremendous speed. Eustace had the devil of a job because not only was the place crammed with staff from the London office and their families, but also with official and unofficial evacuees from the East End, the residue of three or four hundred of them who'd been hurried out in the first panic – they nearly all went back afterwards but in those first months the countryside was packed with townfolk all camping in other people's houses. Old Eustace made very heavy weather of the form and insisted that each person should appear before him. They had to come in batches of twelve and he'd stop and explain to each lot how important it all was. It took all day. The evacuee mothers with children came last and when he thought it was all done Mrs. Broome came trotting in with a bundle saying “Don't forget Baby, sir!” And Eustace didn't look up but said “What's its name?” and she said “I don't know, sir. The young lady has gone back to London
to get some of her things and I'm minding him. I just call him Baby.”'

He paused and laughed. ‘I remember that particularly. It was a catch phrase with me after that. “I just call him ‘Baby'.” Eustace was so wild with her too. He wanted to get the work done. If the child spent the night in the house he'd have to be entered, he said, and “If he hasn't got a name by tomorrow Mrs. Broome, we'll have to give him one.”' Toberman's voice died away in the strange timeless quiet of the insulated room and he turned away to look out of the window at the dancing leaves.

‘That was it, you see,' he said presently. ‘The mother didn't return. Knowing that the kid had got to have papers, Eustace gave him a name to go on with and after that I suppose one thing led to another. I don't remember him after that until he was adopted and going to a prep school. My father was scared of the East coast and packed Mother and me off to Wales.'

Mr. Campion did not speak at once.

‘They were exaggerated times,' he said at last. ‘Confusing too, especially to a child, but you've got no evidence of this little fantasy, you know. It's not a very. . . . well, a very
good
story do you think? To tell, I mean.'

‘I shall tell it if I feel like it.' Toberman's truculence was unabashed. ‘One of the enormous advantages of not being a Kinnit is that I can be as “off-white” as I like. I've no code to live up to. I think young Tim is a bore and I think he's had a good deal more than his share of the gravy, so why shouldn't I tell the facts about his origin if it gives me any satisfaction? Everything else has come to him gold-lined and free! The father of that girl of his must be worth a million. A
million.
And she's the one and only child.'