Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (40 page)

'I felt deeply unhappy at the association being renewed. I wrote and told Reggie so, but he ignored my letter. I comforted myself with the thought that our old servant Barker and his daughter were there to look after him, and I knew that while those loyal souls were with him he would come to no harm. Some years before Reggie died, Alice Barker wrote to tell me that this vile creature had left the house. My brother was no longer at Melpham, you know; he had been made a Canon at Norwich and lived in the Close. I read between the lines of her letter that she had driven him out, and I rejoiced. But far worse was to come. When Reggie died, he left every penny to this dreadful man, for man he was by then, I suppose, if he ever deserved the name. Oh! it was shameful. He had no reason to leave money to me. I had my own. But to have left the Barkers unrewarded after all those years of service! I did what I could to make up for it.' She paused and smiled. 'Not that they need any help now. Alice is in the news. She married that Mr Cressett whom your son - it is your son, isn't it? - has been writing about so much in the papers.' She shook her head. 'We live in a topsy-turvey world when good simple people like Alice Barker are pushed into the headlines.'

'The Cressett of the Pelican affair?'  Gerald asked in surprise.

'Yes,' Mrs Portway replied with a laugh. 'But that absurdity doesn't alter the way Reggie treated the Barkers. That was bad enough, but what upset me so was the fact that the money left, though far more than a creature like that could possibly know what to do with, was only a small part of what my brother-in-law once had. It was obvious to me that this man had been bleeding poor Reggie for years. I've told you what I allowed myself to think. Oh! I didn't blame Reggie even then, though I abhor anything unnatural. I thought that a moment's foolishness had been paid for by a lifetime. The creature had wiles enough, and Reggie had always insisted on the very false notion that a clergyman should be celibate. Men should be men, Professor Middleton, whether they wear cassocks or not.'

She was silent, and Gerald could hear Madame Houdet's voice coming from the house. She was scolding the maid.

'But now,' said Mrs Portway, and her long body relaxed in its cane chair as though she had thrown off the weight of years. 'I see now what it was. Reggie must have learnt of this fraud, and it was for
that
that the wretched Frank Rammage blackmailed him.'

Gerald jerked with surprise. 'Rammage!' he cried. 'Oh! but it can't be the same. I remember the boy you spoke of. He came into the room the day I sprained my ankle. An angelic-looking youth with red hair.'

'Angelic!' Mrs Portway spat the word. 'A mollycoddle! But, yes, he had red hair.'

'This man I know called Rammage is a fat little creature with a bald head. I suppose it must be the same. He's got reddish tufts. Do you know if he lives in Earl's Court Square?'

'He has the impertinence to send letters from that address.' Mrs Portway would commit herself no further on such a subject.

'In any case,' said Gerald, 'I'm afraid this is all the wildest guess of yours, you know. How could Rammage have known of the fraud?'

'He
committed
it, no doubt. He was very quick to make up to Gilbert Stokesay that summer. A great London poet! Frank Rammage didn't let the grass grow under his feet. I thought Gilbert Stokesay was making fun of him. He called him "Little Mr Self-Educated". But perhaps I was wrong. Rammage was probably his assistant in this fraud as well as in other vilenesses. Indeed, I remember that they were together when Gilbert Stokesay made the discovery.' Mrs Portway seemed to be releasing a lot of pent-up emotion.

Gerald smiled. 'I really think you had better not let your imagination travel too far. You've already done your brother-in-law an injustice of that kind.'

'Frank Rammage was capable of anything vile,' she cried. 'I hated him. He was the only person I ever felt jealous of with Reggie. And there seemed to be no way of getting at him. He was so meek.'

Gerald laughed. He hoped that a humorous attitude might lower the tension. 'Well,
Gilbert,'
he said, 'whatever his faults, was completely normal.' He paused and shook his head.

'No, it just won't work, you know,' he said. 'It's kind of you to try to find an answer for me. But if Canon Portway
was
blackmailed - and I do suggest to you that there may be a hundred other reasons for his money disappearing - he wouldn't let himself be got at on a thing like this. He had only to speak his knowledge at any time. Indeed, it was his duty to do so.'

Mrs Portway protested. 'Oh no, you're asking too much of him. The Melpham discovery meant such a lot to him. He believed it had done more than anything to increase the prestige of local historians and of local traditions too. And then he had to think of Professor Stokesay. It's not like now, you know. He was still alive. What a terrible thing to say of his son! Oh no, Reggie would not have done a thing like that. He was a great Christian.'

Gerald looked at her in amazement, but he saw that it would be useless to explain to her what Canon Portway's duty as a
scholar
would have been. 'In any case,' he said, 'all this is pure guess-work. We have no evidence at all that he ever doubted the genuineness of the excavation.'

Mrs Portway smiled. 'Ah! That's what I'm coming to. It was while you were talking that I remembered something he once wrote to me. Oh! it was during the nineteen-thirties. He did not write often then. We disagreed over Abyssinia. Reggie was so easily misled. He wrote to me, "It may be that we have no real right to much of our money. My conscience is not clear about this yet, but you must not be surprised if I write some day to tell you so." I thought it was some Socialist idea of his, you know. He lived by the gospels and he did not see that others could not be so good. But now I wonder. Perhaps he referred to the money we were paid for the Melpham treasure. Of course,' she said proudly, 'if this proves to be true, I shall do my best to refund it.'

'Oh, that would hardly be necessary. The Melpham idol, even if it came from, elsewhere in East Folk, as I suspect, is unique so far in English archaeology. That's why the fraud - if fraud it is - could not have been the work of a real scholar. It would have been too senseless.'

Mrs Portway had closed her eyes; she looked a very old woman.

'I have tired you,' Gerald said. 'Thank you for being so patient with me. I'm afraid we haven't got very far, but you have been very kind. May I come to see you tomorrow, not as an investigator, but just as an old friend in search of a chat about the past?'

Mrs Portway raised her great eyes to him. 'I should like it very much,' she said. 'Meanwhile I shall write down all this and anything else that occurs to me. It will give you some evidence.'

Gerald doubted if such ramblings could be called evidence, but he thanked her and left her sitting with her eyes closed, her wide-brimmed linen hat slumped to one side on her thick coiled hair - an old woman asleep beneath the lilac-bushes.

It was late that night - a little after midnight - when Yves drove into the villa garage in his Lagonda, the only trophy left to him from his
affaire
with the industrialist's widow. She had finally kicked him out just before Christmas; and he had made little protest, for she had it in her power to send him to jail for quite a long stretch. He had forged her signature on one too many cheques. Since that time he had been forced to stay in Merano. His mother had only enough cash to keep him in current pocket money, and Mrs Portway would produce nothing. He had thought for a few days that he had found an American woman to take him to Venice, but in the end she had gone without him. He had tried to get into the racket of smuggling watches from Switzerland through the mountains, but neither his physique nor his intelligence nor his trustworthiness had commended themselves to the gang-leader. He had just enough cash from Madame Houdet to keep him in a bad temper and periodic bouts of drunkenness. He was drunk this night when he returned and he severely dented the mudguard of his car on the garage door. He entered the house in a rage.

Already the intense heat of the day had once more given place to ominous rolls of thunder. Lilian Portway lay awake in her great walnut bed listening to the thunder and watching the long procession of memories called up by her talk with Gerald. A louder clap suggested that the storm had broken overhead, but a moment later she heard Yves' voice bawling drunkenly in his mother's room. She guessed the thunder-clap to have been in fact his banging of the front door. She was so used to these scenes that she smoothly slipped back into her reverie. They usually ended quite soon, with Yves fumbling his drunken way to his bedroom. Tonight, however, the shouting seemed to go on for longer - first Yves' manly oaths and abuse, then Stephanie's tearful but shrill protests. Lilian had acquired a hatred of the French language from hearing it so often abused.

Madame Houdet, it was clear, had got out of bed, for Lilian could hear the patter of bare feet. Then suddenly there was a sound of a blow and then another, and a third as something or someone fell to the floor.

Lilian got out of bed with difficulty; her legs so quickly became stiff now after a few hours' rest and she was liable to giddy fits on rising. She sat for a moment dangling her long legs over the side of the bed; then, putting on her mauve muslin dressing-gown and her lilac quilted slippers, she made her way across the corridor to Stéphanie's room. Already, in the passage, she could hear Yves shouting, as he loved to do, that the Nazis were bunglers, that they had botched thèir work - what were their famous ovens for but to get rid of such unwanted rubbish as his mother? Lilian was too used to this to be horrified any longer, but she was still repelled by the thought that the son who shouted such things really loved his mother, and in other, more maudlin moods, would fondle and caress her. The door stood open, and huddled on the floor lay Stéphanie, in her nightgown, moaning.

'Go to your bedroom, Yves,' Lilian cried, and she ran to raise his mother from the ground.

A combination of self-interest and fear usually made Yves obedient to Mrs Portway's orders. The situation unfortunately had gone on too long; famiharity breeds contempt. He was, too, very drunk. He raised his fist and had she not stumbled out of his reach he would have hit her in the face.

'Shut up, you old cow,' he shouted; 'they ought to have finished you off too. The Fascists had no more sense than the Nazis.' Suddenly he began to roar with laughter as a joke worked up inside him. 'Say, you old dames must miss your camp exercise,' he laughed. 'You don't want to get out of training.' He leaned down and pulled his mother by the arm. She tottered to her feet. 'Come on, both of you. Get moving. Left, right, left, right,' he shouted. Then he began to bawl oaths and abuse at them in German and Itahan. The two old women shuffled behind one another to the door, Stéphanie pushing at Lilian to avoid her son's blows. As they passed through the door, Yves collapsed on the bed in howls of laughter.

Madame Houdet slumped on to the floor in the passage and began to pray; but Mrs Portway ran past the door of her own room and down the stairs. She had only the thought that she must run, she could not let them keep her in that place again. She must get away before they shut her up once more behind barbed wire. Through the garden she ran with tottering steps and out into the road. Her hair uncoiled and streamed around her shoulders, a slipper fell from her foot, but she still kept on. It was a moonless night, but even had it been twice as light, she would not have known where she was going. She reached a little path that ran down the hillside - a walk made in the eighteen-eighties with rustic wooden railings and planted evergreens, a road to take tourists to view the 'panorama' - on she kept and then stumbled and fell, rolling a few feet on to a grassy bank below. She lay there, cut and bruised. For a while she was stunned, and when she came to her senses her mind was clouded and she could feel no life in her right arm and leg. The thunder and lightning died away in heavy rain and her mind too faded away in vague confusion. She was not found until six that morning, when some workmen were making their way into the town. They knew the strange
Englische Witwe
by sight and carried her back to the villa.

Gerald had been kept awake by the storm and he almost thought in his tiredness the next morning that he would present his excuses to Mrs Portway and leave Merano. There was nothing to be gained by stirring up the old woman's memories. He would tell Elvira, when he got back to England, that he did not think she should be left with the Houdets; but he did not believe that Elvira was likely to take any action. The whole visit had not only been fruitless, but depressing. However, by half past ten he felt more refreshed and reflected that it would be selfish not to pay the promised call. At sixty, he had a superstitious dislike of disappointing the hopes of old people of seventy.

Madame Houdet opened the door to him. She looked old and exhausted, but her make-up was complete as usual. 'Mrs Portway is very ill,' she said. 'She can see no one. She met with an accident. She has a stroke and pneumonia. No one can help her now but the
bon Dieu.'

Gerald attempted to get some details of Lilian's accident from her, but her answers were confused and vague.
'Il faut prier le bon Dieu de lui pardonner,'
she said.

As he turned to leave, a priest came up the path and Madame Houdet's full attention was given to welcoming him as Gerald walked slowly away. When he reached the gate, Yves came running after him. 'My God,' he cried, 'this is certainly a big responsibility for me. The only man in the house.' Gerald offered to stay, but Yves would have none of it. 'I guess I must go through with it alone. But thanks a lot.' He did, however, borrow six thousand lire to deal with urgent expenses until he could get down to the bank.

Gerald returned to England immediately, flying from Innsbruck. He was being packed into his car by Larwood at London airport when he saw a woman getting on to the bus for the passengers from Paris. Her walk and the trim neatness of her figure were familiar to him. As the bus moved off, she turned to look out of the window. It was Dollie. She looked, of course, much older, but more than that, her face was white and puffy and her hair was slipping untidily from beneath her hat. She looked, as he expected, a confirmed drunkard. He waved, but she did not recognize him.