Cards of Identity (2 page)

‘Father,’ said the young man, suddenly looking at Mr Paradise, ‘here’s a visitor. Do pay attention.’

At this, the lady, too, turned towards Mr Paradise; and so at last did the father, slowly bending his head sidewards until his eyes were wholly absorbed in the visitor. After a moment of this, he uttered merely one word: ‘Yes?’

Mr Paradise, poor man, had no idea what to say. It was impossible, with three such figures talking at such a distance in thousands of pounds, to hurl back a quip about burglars or income tax. Moreover, to be scrutinized as through three sets of lorgnons embarrassed him violently, the more so because it was being done from a point fifteen feet above his head. He began to advance across the neglected gravel, but not only were his legs weakened by the mention of so much money but his head was quite out of joint; the closer he drew to this splendid trio, the higher he was obliged to tilt his face. By the time he had dragged himself to the base of the terrace he felt every inch a beggar; even his riding-crop, far from inducing confidence, only emphasized the inexcusable lowliness which any horseless person feels when he advances on the mounted. All his secrets, his greediest intentions, his devotion to making one penny grow where none had grown before and then to eke it out in exciting farthings, seemed to be reflected in the six great eyes that looked down on him. Fortunately, he observed, the eyes’ owners did not appear to be enraged by what they so clearly saw; on the contrary, they observed his corruption with the friendly curiosity of scientists. Possibly for the same reason they said nothing to untie his tongue, as if they had expected him and made jovial bets as to what his first words would be.

At last the lady came to his aid. With no effort she rearranged her face into the time-tested lines of feminine invitation, drawing Mr Paradise forward by sheer suction. Into her eyes she injected vapour of a kind Mr Paradise had not seen since his mother bathed him on her knees. It was remarkable that though enveloped in a sable coat she could convey a sense of warm bath-towels and hissing gaslights shining through clouds of steam, intermixed, strangely enough, with the warmth which the round legs of chorus girls fill the air with in their passage. Hers was, in short, an appeal to the lost identity of his childhood and youth, and it was out of these years that he croaked innocently:

‘I love the old place.’

She answered immediately: ‘Of
course
you do!’ and sent him a sparkling flash of congratulation.

‘So I just came to see if you were all right,’ he continued, fragments of his adult plan tumbling back into his head.

‘To see if we were all right,’ the man repeated slowly. ‘I see.’

‘There being burglars …’

‘Ah, yes. Well, as you see, we
are
all right.’

There was another painful silence, until the man said, quite sharply: ‘Won’t you come up?’

Mr Paradise mounted the steps, dragging his crop like a tail.

‘Is your horse quite safe, sir?’ asked the younger man politely, ‘or shall I take it to the stables for you?’

‘Frankly,’ croaked Mr Paradise, missing the top step and all but falling on his face, ‘I have temporarily no horse.’

‘Only the crop is permanent,’ suggested the lady, smiling.

‘Exactly, madam,’ said Mr Paradise, ‘by force of habit, I suppose.’ Suddenly recovering his wits, he made a grimace and added: ‘With taxes what they are, my few poor steeds have had to seek other pastures.’

‘Doubtless you miss them dreadfully?’ she asked sympathetically.

Their language, he felt, was becoming rather old-fashioned, so he replied more lightly: ‘Oh, I still manage to pick one up here and there,’ and proceeded to do as much for his legs.

‘You must tell us your name, sir,’ said the older man, examining Mr Paradise from head to foot.

‘Henry Paradise is my name. My sister and I have lived in the South Lodge here for many years.’

‘Ah! Then you knew my old aunt, old Miss Mallet?’

‘Very well indeed, sir. And her father before her.’

‘Well, well! You are virtually a member of the family, it seems. Are you also familiar with this house?’

‘I know it from top to bottom,’ said Mr Paradise, feeling jaunty again and giving his knee a slap with his crop. ‘I might say there is hardly a draught in it that has not played on my neck.’

The man seemed gratified. He gave Mr Paradise another close examination, actually stepping aside, at one point, to see how Mr Paradise looked in silhouette. Then, he asked abruptly: ‘Do you always have a moustache?’

‘Really,
Father!’ said the young man. ‘What a very rude question!’

‘Much
too personal,’ said the lady; ‘you have not even introduced us.’

Mr Paradise, delighted by their support, smiled tolerantly and said: ‘I really don’t mind the question. As to the moustache, I have had it for years, though, like most people with moustaches, I have shaved it off from time to time to see what’s underlying, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly,’ said the gentleman: ‘that was just the reply I expected.’ Giving Mr Paradise a final glance over, he said to his companions: ‘Exactly the man we want, no?’

They both nodded.

‘Would you by any chance,’ the gentleman continued, ‘have an hour or two to spare this morning?’

‘Is it quite fair to ask that?’ said the lady. ‘Mr Paradise probably has many things to do.’

‘Most
inconsiderate, Father,’ said the young man, giving a sigh which suggested that he and the lady had suffered from this selfishness for many years. Mr Paradise suspected a not unpleasant pattern for his behaviour in the future: he would serve his new patron with smiling amiability and the other two would marvel at his unselfishness. ‘Whatever my business,’ he said, ‘I find it hard to refuse my help when it is asked.’

At this all three of them nodded with such enthusiasm that Mr Paradise was very puzzled.

‘Well, that is admirable!’ said the gentleman in a loud voice, as if suddenly everything had been settled. ‘Now let me introduce us. I am
Captain Mallet, nephew, as I mentioned, of the old Miss Mallet who was so dear a friend of yours. This is my son, Beaufort; and this is his wicked stepmother, my present wife. Where his
real
mother is, it would be safer not to inquire. Parenthood presents many complications nowadays and most of them are not fit for public discussion, even with an old friend of the family.’

Mr Paradise thought this introduction had been very late in coming and very improperly performed – exactly what one expected, in fact, from a very rich person. ‘It is most courageous of you, Captain,’ he said, ‘to open up this fine old place again, with taxation what it is.’

‘Oh, you think so?’ said the captain, with surprise. ‘Personally, I cannot think of it as much of a place to live in – rather a
den,
I would call it, compared with some of our other places. We just happen to need it, at the moment. As to taxation, I never have anything to do with it at all. I prefer, in fact, never to have the subject mentioned by anyone in my hearing.’

‘Very rude, Father,’ said Beaufort with another exasperated sigh. ‘Can you never tell when people are trying to say a friendly thing?’

‘Mr Paradise has already been kind enough,’ said Mrs Mallet, ‘to ignore my husband’s recurrent rudeness.’

Mr Paradise responded with a smile of ineffable servility. He saw it all so clearly now and knew he could slip into place like a king-pin.

‘Shall we go in?’ said the captain, crossly. He opened the big door, and then turned abruptly on Mr Paradise. ‘You have not become another person suddenly, have you?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you would rather not come in at all? After all, you haven’t the slightest idea what sort of people we are or what you are in for.’

Again Mr Paradise gave the gracious, accommodating smile which, though he had only used it twice before, seemed already to be an established part of his life. ‘I am at your service, Captain,’ he said.

*

Miss Paradise’s cuckoo-clock, gift of Alfred Truter, cuckooed one o’clock. As the jaded bird popped in again, Miss Paradise gave a groan of joy. Sitting down to the kitchen-table, which she had already furnished for the worst, she looked at her brother’s empty place and gratefully murmured: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’ – adding,
as she returned his sausages to the larder: ‘I was an-hungered and ye took me in.’ He was splendid, really splendid, her brother was: who but he, with his sharp eyes, his trim moustache, his stiff little breeches, his robin-like brain and look could poke his nose in on people just rising from their first breakfast and be asked to lunch? When she imagined how furious she would be if someone’s brother tried to play such a trick on her; when she pictured the speed and hostility with which she would bundle the wretch out of doors again, she was thrilled by her Henry’s audacity and thanked Heaven for having given her such a brother. His absence would give her a chance to give the whole lodge a tremendous sweeping and dusting: it would delight him to see everything spick and span when he returned, probably a little tired. First meetings were always tiring for Henry: there were the words to be chosen with such tact, the visage to be torn from the shape it had kept from the last patron and rearranged to fit the new one, the whole self to be adapted to unfamiliar usage in the space of a mere morning. But he would manage it: when she next saw him he would be quite another person, and it would be her duty still to recognize as her brother a man who would in fact be someone quite different. She would know it was Henry because he would know her and would sit in his favourite chair unconscious of having changed, expecting the same things in the same order in the same surroundings.

So she threw herself into the housework, faintly singing and talking to herself and trying to anticipate the story he would tell when he returned – always such a thrilling return, the first one, with the new yet always familiar tale issuing from the new face, accompanied by mannerisms and little gestures new-born that very day like lambs. At last, like any other housewife, she happened to glance at the bedroom clock – and lo and behold, it said five o’clock, and the evening fog was closing in again on the latticed windows. ‘Why, the naughty boy!’ she exclaimed with a gasp, ‘he has managed to stay for tea as well. Surely that’s a little risky on the first day?’

She unwrapped her head and made tea. When the cuckoo sang six, she began to listen for her brother’s step, confident that she would know it no matter how much it might have altered since breakfast-time: some patrons were halt. But when it was eight o’clock and pitch dark, she began to worry. Surely no man in his right mind, she asked with a burst of practicalness, would keep Henry for dinner as well? On
the other hand, one must never forget the extraordinarily temperamental behaviour of the rich, to say nothing of Henry’s amazing talent for distorting time to such a degree that one hardly knew whether it was past, present, or future – in particular, how he could prolong a conversation that was slipping away by hitching its tail to the head of a new topic and starting out afresh as if no change of subject had occurred. And then there were his countless anecdotes, some of them quite technical and of real interest to men of affairs – terrifying, almost morbid tales of fortunes imperilled by inefficiency, taxation, wastage, recklessness. ‘I am sure,’ Henry had once confessed to her, ‘that they often have the feeling, once I have gone, that I stayed much too long; but I am equally sure that they feel that this was because they selfishly refused to let me go.’

But when eleven p.m. came, and still no Henry, Miss Paradise’s feelings began slowly to change. She didn’t dare put on her coat and go up to the big house: she had done so once on a similar occasion and disturbed her brother at a crucial moment of the budding friendship: his rage had been terrible and he had said that her impatience had cost him weeks of effort. So now she went slowly to bed, sulky, but trying hard to remind herself that she had spent many a night alone when Henry was sitting up with a sick cow of Sir Malcolm’s or resolutely sticking at the bridge-table of the gayer General Pugh.

But when she was half asleep her thoughts began to wander. Say something had happened to Henry; say he had been drowned in that flooded bomb crater in the middle of the park? I would never get over the shock, Miss Paradise said to herself, starting to cry; with Henry gone I would be another person, a sort of ghost. She cried until her grief had been eased, after which, like any bereaved person, she half-shelved the dead and half-opened his bank-account. Even for the best of legatees this is a painful moment of emotional readjustment: woe must still be conscientiously sounded with the left hand, while the right is shaping a melody quite out of keeping with moral harmony. But at least the moment of reading out the will is one of the few occasions when capital drops its striped trousers and reveals itself as none other than naked cash. Yet only for a few exciting minutes – for Miss Paradise found, marvellously enough, that no sooner had she transferred the dead Henry’s hard cash to her own account than it instantly resumed its trousers and became capital once more – godlike,
interest-bearing capital of far greater stature than it had been prior to Henry’s death; exactly twice the size, in fact, since theirs had been a joint-account and death had thus no option but to be a tidy carver. Indeed, Miss Paradise, suddenly possessed of exactly twice the capital and exactly half the dependents on it, now began to take over the sole share of worrying about it – was it happy as it was; could it not be made happier by being shifted to more interesting quarters? She at last decided that she would take this question up with Henry, having quite forgotten by now that he was no longer the other half of the joint. When, abruptly, she realized what shocking tricks her mind had been playing, she was more than horrified, she was also confused and exhausted. For, in those exciting moments of put-and-take, she had so rearranged her world that not only had Henry’s identity been allowed to dwindle, but her own had proportionately doubled. Now, back in reality, she found it painful to divide her new self, swollen by its new capital, in two, and restore Henry to his rightful half. In consequence, though she struggled for many more minutes to listen for his dear, returning steps, she was harried by the suspicion that the ears with which she was listening were attached to a person who no longer existed, and that the sound for which they were listening had long since ceased to be.