The Complete Stories (30 page)

  "He often expressed his belief that all motorists of all classes should be treated as criminals."

  Atwater received this with disconcerting enthusiasm. "And he was quite right," he cried in louder tones than can ever have been used in that room except perhaps during spring-cleaning. "I'm fed to the teeth with motor-cars. I'm fed to the teeth with civilization. I want to farm. That's a man's life."

  "Mr. Atwater, will nothing I say persuade you that your aspirations are no concern of mine?"

  "There's no call to be sarcastic. If I'm not wanted, you've only to say so straight."

  "You are not wanted."

  "Thank you," he said. "That's all I wanted to know."

  I got him through the door, but halfway across the front hall he paused again. "I spent my last ten bob on a wreath."

  "I'm sorry you did that. I'll refund it."

  He turned on me with a look of scorn. "Plant," he said, "I didn't think it was in you to say a thing like that. Those flowers were a sacred thing. You wouldn't understand that, would you? I'd have starved to send them. I may have sunk pretty low, but I have some decency left, and that's more than some people can say even if they belong to posh clubs and look down on fellows who earn a decent living. Good-bye, Plant. We shall not meet again. D'you mind if I don't shake hands."

  That was how he left me, but it was not the last of him. That evening I was called to the telephone to speak to a Mr. Long. Familiar tones, jaunty once more, greeted me. "That you, Plant? Atwater here. Excuse the alias, won't you. I say, I hope you didn't take offence at the way I went off today. I've been thinking, and I see you were perfectly right. May I come round for another yarn?"

  "No."

  "Tomorrow, then?"

  "No."

  "Well, when shall I come?"

  "I'm afraid I can't see you."

  "No, I quite understand, old man. I'd feel the same myself. It's only this. In the circumstances I'd like to accept your very sporting offer to pay for those flowers. I'll call round for the money if you like or will you send it?"

  "I'll send it."

  "Care of the Holborn Post Office finds me. Fifteen bob, they cost."

  "You said ten this afternoon."

  "Did I? I meant fifteen."

  "I will send you ten shillings. Good-bye."

  "Good scout," said Atwater.

  So I put a note in an envelope and sent it to the man who killed my father.

  VI

  Time dragged; April, May, the beginning of June. I left my club and visited my Uncle Andrew for an uneasy week; then back to the club. I took the manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle to the seaside, to an hotel where I once spent three months in great contentment writing The Frightened Footman: they gave me the best suite, at this time of year, for five guineas a week. The forlorn, out-of-season atmosphere was just as I knew it—the shuttered ballroom, the gusts of rain on the roof of the "sun lounge," the black esplanade, the crocodiles of private-school boys on their way to football, the fanatical bathers hissing like ostlers as they limped over the shingle into the breakers; the visitors' high church, the visitors' low church, and the church of the residents—all empty. Everything was as it had been three years before, but in a week I was back in London with nothing written. It was no good until I got things settled, I told myself; but "getting things settled" merely meant waiting until the house was sold and the lawyers had finished with the will. I took furnished rooms in Ebury Street and waited there, my thoughts more and more turning towards the country and the need of a house there, a permanent home of my own possession. I began to study the house-agents' advertisements on the back page of The Times. Finally I notified two or three firms of my needs, and was soon amply supplied with specifications and orders-to-view.

  During this time I received a call from young Mr. Godley of Goodchild and Godley. There was nothing at all artistic about young Mr. Godley. He looked and spoke like a motor salesman; his galleries were his "shop" and their contents "stuff" and "things." He would have seemed at ease, if we had met casually, but the long preamble of small talk—references to mutual acquaintances, holiday resorts abroad, sport, politics, a "first-class man for job lots of wine"—suggested uncertainty; he was trying to decide how to take me. Finally he came to the point.

  "Your father used to do a certain amount of work for us, you know."

  "I know."

  "Restorations mostly. Occasionally he used to make a facsimile for a client who was selling a picture to America and wanted one to take its place. That kind of work."

  "Often they were his own compositions."

  "Well, yes, I believe a few of them were. What we call in the trade ‘pastiche,' you know."

  "I saw some of them," I said.

  "He was wonderfully gifted."

  "Wonderfully."

  A pause. Mr. Godley twiddled his Old Harrovian tie. "His work with us was highly confidential."

  "Of course."

  "I was wondering—our firm was, whether you had been through his papers yet. I mean, did he keep any records of his work or anything of the kind?"

  "I'm afraid I haven't been through his things yet. I should think it quite likely. He was very methodical in some ways."

  "The papers are all in your own hands?"

  "So far as I know."

  "If anything of the kind was to turn up, we could rely on your discretion. I mean it would do no one any good ... I mean you would want your father to be remembered by his exhibited work."

  "You need not worry," I said.

  "Splendid. I was sure you would understand. We had a spot of unpleasantness with his man."

  "Jellaby?"

  "Yes. They both came to see us, husband and wife, immediately after the accident. You might almost say they tried to blackmail us."

  "Did you give them anything?"

  "No. Goodchild saw them and I imagine he gave them a good flea in the ear. They had nothing to go on."

  "Odd pair the Jellabys."

  "I don't think we shall be worried by them again."

  "Nor by me. Blackmail is not quite in my line."

  "No, no, my dear fellow, of course, I didn't for a moment mean to suggest ... Ha, ha, ha."

  "Ha, ha, ha."

  "But if anything should turn up ..."

  "I shall be discreet about it."

  "Or any studies for the paintings he did for us."

  "Anything incriminating," I said.

  "Trade secrets," said Mr. Godley.

  "Trade secrets," I repeated.

  That was almost the only amusing incident in my London season.

  The sale of the house in St. John's Wood proved more irksome than I had expected. Ten years before the St. John's Wood Residential Amenities Company who built the neighbouring flats had offered my father £6,000 for his freehold; he had preserved the letter, which was signed, "Alfred Hardcastle, Chairman." Their successors, the Hill Crest Court Exploitation Co., now offered me £2,500; their letter was also signed Mr. Hardcastle. I refused, and put the house into an agent's hands; after two months they reported one offer—of £2,500 from a Mr. Hardcastle, the managing director of St. John's Wood Residential Estates Ltd. "In the circumstances," they wrote, "we consider this a satisfactory price." The circumstances were that no one who liked that kind of house would tolerate its surroundings; having dominated the district, the flats could make their own price. I accepted it and went to sign the final papers at Mr. Hardcastle's office, expecting an atmosphere of opulence and bluster; instead, I found a modest pair of rooms, one of the unlet flats at the top of the building; on the door were painted the names of half a dozen real estate companies and the woodwork bore traces of other names which had stood there and been obliterated; the chairman opened the door himself and let me in. He was, as my father had supposed, a Jew; a large, neat, middle-aged, melancholy, likeable fellow, who before coming to business, praised my father's painting with what I believe was complete sincerity.

  There was no other visible staff; just Mr. Hardcastle sitting among his folders and filing cabinets, telling me how he had felt when he lost his own father. Throughout all the vicissitudes of the flats this man had controlled them and lived for them; little companies had gone into liquidation; little, allied companies had been floated; the names of nephews and brothers-in-law had come and gone at the head of the notepaper; stocks had been written down and up, new shares had been issued, bonuses and dividends declared, mortgages transferred and foreclosed, little blocks of figures moved from one balance sheet to another, all in this single room. For the last ten years a few thousand pounds capital had been borrowed and lent backwards and forwards from one account to another and, somehow, working sixteen hours a day, doing his own typing and accountancy, Mr. Hardcastle had sustained life, kept his shoes polished and his trousers creased, had his hair cut regularly and often, bought occasional concert tickets on family anniversaries and educated, he told me, a son in the United States and a daughter in Belgium. The company to which I finally conveyed my freehold was a brand-new one, registered for the occasion and soon, no doubt, doomed to lose its identity in the kaleidoscopic changes of small finance. The cheque, signed by Mr. Hardcastle, was duly honoured, and when the sum, largely depleted by my solicitor, was paid into my account, I found that with the insurance money added and my overdraft taken away, I had a credit balance for the first time in my life, of rather more than £3,500. With this I set about planning a new life.

  Mr. Hardcastle had been willing to wait a long time to make his purchase; once it was done, however, his plans developed with surprising speed. Workmen were cutting the trees and erecting a screen of hoarding while the vans were removing the furniture to store; a week later I came to visit the house; it was a ruin; it might have been mined. Presumably there is some method in the business of demolition; none was apparent to a layman, the roof was off, the front was down, and on one side the basement lay open; on the other the walls still stood their full height, and the rooms, three-sided like stage settings, exposed their Morris papers, flapping loose in the wind where the fireplaces and window frames had been torn out. The studio had disappeared, leaving a square of rubble to mark its site; new shoots appeared here and there in the trampled mess of the garden. A dozen or more workmen were there, two or three of them delving away in a leisurely fashion, the rest leaning on their tools and talking; it seemed inconceivable that in this fashion they could have done so much in such little time. The air was full of flying grit. It was no place to linger. When next I passed that way, a great concrete wing covered the site; it was cleaner than the rest of the block and by a miscalculation of the architects, the windows were each a foot or two below the general line; but, like them, were devoid of curtains.

  LUCY SIMMONDS

  Chapter Two of the unfinished novel Work Suspended

  I

  My project of settling in the country was well received by my friends.

  Each saw in it a likely convenience for himself. I understood their attitude well. Country houses meant something particular and important in their lives, a system of permanent bolt-holes. They had, most of them, gradually dropped out of the round of formal entertaining; country life, for them, meant not a series of invitations, but of successful, predatory raids. Their lives were liable to sharp reverses; their quarters in London were camps which could be struck at an hour's notice, as soon as the telephone was cut off. Country houses were permanent; even when the owner was abroad, the house was there, with a couple of servants or, at the worst, someone at a cottage who came in to light fires and open windows, someone who, at a pinch, could be persuaded also to make the bed and wash up. They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree of proprietorship impossible on the neutral ground of London. The owners of these places were, by their nature, a patient race, but repeated abuse was apt to sour them; new blood in their ranks was highly welcome. I detected this greeting in every eye and could not resent it.

  There was also another, more amiable reason for their interest. Nearly all of them—and, for that matter, myself as well—professed a specialized enthusiasm for domestic architecture. It was one of the peculiarities of my generation and there is no accounting for it. In youth we had pruned our aesthetic emotions hard back so that in many cases they had reverted to briar stock; we, none of us, wrote or read poetry, or, if we did, it was of a kind which left unsatisfied those wistful, half-romantic, half-aesthetic, peculiarly British longings, which, in the past, used to find expression in so many slim lambskin volumes. When the poetic mood was on us, we turned to buildings, and gave them the place which our fathers accorded to Nature—to almost any buildings, but particularly those in the classical tradition, and, more particularly, in its decay. It was a kind of nostalgia for the style of living which we emphatically rejected in practical affairs. The notabilities of Whig society became, for us, what the Arthurian paladins were in the time of Tennyson. There was never a time when so many landless men could talk at length about landscape gardening. Even Roger compromised with his Marxist austerities so far as to keep up his collection of the works of Batty Langley and William Halfpenny. "The nucleus of my museum," he explained. "When the revolution comes, I've no ambitions to be a commissar or a secret policeman. I want to be director of the Museum of Bourgeois Art."

  He was overworking the Marxist vocabulary. That was always Roger's way, to become obsessed with a new set of words and to extend them, deliberately, beyond the limits of sense; it corresponded to some sombre, interior need of his to parody whatever, for the moment, he found venerable; when he indulged it I was reminded of the ecclesiastical jokes of those on the verge of religious melancholy. Roger had been in that phase himself when I first met him.