Carson's Conspiracy (3 page)

 

But at this time Carson's trepidations were only marginally on any domestic front. In the city there were storm clouds looming, rocks ahead. Although normally not much given to metaphorical expression, he did find himself, in interior monologue, employing these and similar poetical locutions. They gave a kind of hitch up, or vague dignity, to what threatened to be a far from elevated turn in his fortunes. If difficulty turned into disaster, it wouldn't, needless to say, be in any way his own fault. So long as financial and industrial conditions were reasonably ‘normal', he was amply buffered against any occasional awkward inquiry into this enterprise or that. But when everybody you met prated of recession or depression or slumps, and hitherto cosy concerns were fussing about their cash-flow, and others actually folding all over the place, there was far too much peering and prying going on in banking and accounting and even legal circles. It wasn't in the least, of course, that he expected to be cast into gaol next week. Mountains of confused and conflicting documentation would have to be sifted before anything of that kind could be on the carpet. Still, it would perhaps be only prudent to take time by the forelock now. The wise man strikes while the iron is hot.

These thoughts, which had less of the pitch of poetry than of that proverbial wisdom of the folk available to the long-deceased waterman and his lorry-liberating son, were much in Carl Carson's mind when he was visited at Garford, promptly upon summons, by a useful and spirited young henchman called Pluckworthy.

 

‘You know, I rather like this place,' Peter Pluckworthy said. He had been admitted to what Carson called his library, and was comfortably settled in a large chair. ‘It seems my great-grandfather Hubert had very much the same sort of outfit. Long before my time, of course. He had to sell it because he drank so much champagne out of the slippers of actresses. Odd addiction – at least when carried to that excess. If you have to sell up Garford, Carl, it won't be for quite that sort of reason.'

‘I'm determined to get a damned good price for it.'

‘Hold hard!' Pluckworthy sat up in alarm. ‘You're not really thinking of anything of the sort, are you? Why, you've been here no time at all.'

‘Things are pretty bad, Peter my boy. Isn't that what you've come to tell me?'

‘Perhaps so. Or, rather, quite decidedly. And there's just precisely one thing you must
not
do. Be seen to be drawing in your horns. Carson Universal Credit would be down the drain within a week. And all the other concerns would follow – like the bloody rats of Hamelin town in Brunswick.'

‘Brunswick?' Carl Carson was perplexed.

‘Where the river Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side.'

‘Oh, poetry! Still spouting it, are you?' Carson had relaxed. He quite liked the young man. This was partly because of the rather anomalous kind of hey-you condition (by no means ill-paid) to which he had reduced him. Pluckworthy was, in effect, his creature, licensed to move here and there among the Carson enterprises and report on the understrappers as he thought fit. Carson – oddly, perhaps – also liked Pluckworthy because of his old school tie. Not that the lad wore the thing; it was just that you knew at once that he had it in a drawer. But the chief reason for his regard was his discerning in Peter a man who would come clean in a crisis. Or dirty. No nonsense about not touching pitch. If anything, Peter had an instinctive wish for things to grow ever shadier around him. You might put it that he had a fund of recklessness that he'd be only too delighted to draw on. It hadn't been an asset, so far. Once or twice, it had been almost a threat. But it made him a useful man to hold
en disponsibilité
. Or, in Carson's own idiom, to have in the bag.

‘How's the missis?' Pluckworthy asked. Setting store by the independence he didn't really possess, he took care to come to business, or veer away from it, as he pleased.

‘So-so. Imagines things a bit.' Carson glanced warily at his assistant. ‘Trivial things, of course. And takes fancies for this and that. She has insisted on my having my portrait painted, for example. It's going ahead upstairs most days of the week. Fellow called Lely.'

‘How very amusing! What's he going after: a likeness – or a board-room icon?'

‘You talk a great deal of rubbish, Peter.' Carson frequently said this when he hadn't caught on to something, and the conception of a boardroom icon eluded him. ‘Tell me about those people in Birmingham.'

So they talked shop, and as they did so Carson's uneasiness grew. He saw connections and implications, for one thing, that had eluded the young man, sharp as he was. He even came to doubt his persuasion that the worst could happen only after that slow scrutiny by cautious accountants and their kind of balance sheets and prospectuses and tax returns and what-have-you. Weren't we living, he asked himself, in a stagnant economy in which reasonable business enterprise was not only discouraged but positively persecuted? It wasn't even as if he was hearing faint footsteps advancing from afar – implacably, perhaps, but at a pace affording opportunity for evasive action. It might be a knock on the door in the small hours the night after next.

Eventually Pluckworthy rose to go, but as he did so Carson's wife came into the room. Cynthia Carson liked Carl's young assistant. She never mentioned his name to anybody without adding the thought that he was so very much the gentleman. This irked Carson. He didn't care a damn whether a fellow was what they called a gentleman or not, but he felt that in Cynthia's reiterated assertion there lurked the implication that most of the people who bobbed up on them did so straight from the gutter. And this was patently untrue. For instance, Cynthia could have made just the same remark about the young dauber, Lely, paint-pots and all. And, no time ago, hadn't there been those Applebys, who had come to lunch in a perfectly friendly if slightly non-committal way? There was a confused strain of feeling in Carson here. We have seen that his own mild regard for Peter Pluckworthy proceeded partly from his perception that the boy wasn't the first of the Pluckworthys to wear boots.

‘Hallo, Cynthia – how goes?' Although much the Carsons' junior, and clearly a mere hireling or client as well, Pluckworthy used their Christian names in the most casual way. Cynthia accepted this; she would have declared that it made her feel young again. Carson, if he reflected on the matter at all, probably judged that a young chap who had to carry about with him a surname as outlandish as his assistant's would naturally prefer Billys and Betsys all the time.

‘Everything goes quite nicely, Peter, thank you. The cows are in milk, and the sheep are in very good fleece.' It was one of Cynthia's odd intermittent persuasions that, having moved into the country, she was much involved with problems of rural economy. ‘But I hope you are going to stay to lunch? The painter, Mr Lely, will be coming this afternoon, and you might enjoy meeting him.'

‘I'm sure I should. Unfortunately, I have to hurry away.' Pluckworthy was well aware that his employer, having heard what he wanted to hear (or, rather, what he didn't), was disposed to be rid of him. ‘But may I have a peep at the portrait before I go? Carl has told me about it, and I'd like to see it.'

‘But of course! I think it's going to be terribly good. We'll go straight upstairs now.'

Carson had to acquiesce in this, although he wasn't sure he wanted the portrait to be seen by anybody. But the thing was, after all, manufactured for purposes of display (whether in a board room or elsewhere) and Pluckworthy seemed a reasonable person to try it out on. So he followed upstairs contentedly enough.

‘Have you been hearing anything of Robin lately?' he heard Pluckworthy ask.

‘Yes, indeed!' Cynthia was delighted by this interest in her family. ‘We think he may be intending to visit us quite soon, after all. He seems to be rather keen on the idea of England. We begin to wonder whether there may not be a lady in the case. A romance! He may have met some nice English girl, you know, who was visiting at the Embassy in Washington.'

Quite frequently nowadays Cynthia added to her basic delusion this further delusion of grandeur. It was an additional exacerbation so far as Carson's nervous system went. Groton and Harvard had been bad enough. This further imbecility was really intolerable. Carson took two steps at a time, in order to come abreast of Pluckworthy and give him a sharp glance. He had once or twice suspected that the young man – unlike all the rest of the world, apparently – had penetrated to the fact of Robin Carson's non-existence. But if this was so, the knowledge wasn't betraying him into a glimmer of amusement now. He merely paused in his ascent for a moment to address his employer a shade more abruptly than usual.

‘If your son arrives,' he asked, ‘what will you do with him? Suggest taking him into one of your concerns?'

‘I'll decide that when I see him.'

Carson was rather pleased at contriving this reply, which held a certain ambiguity relevant to the underlying situation. If Pluckworthy
did
know, it could be construed as exhibiting a decent regard for Cynthia's unhappy mental aberration. If Pluckworthy
didn't
, it was sufficiently crisp to suggest that he regarded the young man's question as having been on the impertinent side.

 

But now they were in the big, low room that Humphry Lely had turned into a studio. It was under the leads, and it was necessary to transfer to the service staircase to reach it. No doubt it had been the abode of housemaids in an earlier time; light and air entered only through a skylight; among its absent luxuries, therefore, was any sort of view. Presumably the skylight stood in for the ‘northern exposure' which Carson had heard of as favoured by painters. He didn't much care for it himself. During the hours in which he had ‘sat' he would have been grateful for a window, and even for a distant prospect of Cynthia's imaginary sheep and cows. It was a bleak, bare apartment – and the more oppressively so since every faintest film of dust had been rigorously scoured out of it in the interest of the mystery now going forward. Apart from a nondescript swivel chair, which Lely had explained would not form part of the final effect, the only piece of furniture – also imported by the painter – was an excessively opulent object somewhat verbosely called a
Regence
ormolu-mounted ebonised bureau
plat
. This gilded monstrosity Carson was to be supposed to have appropriated as a desk; he was to be seated at it holding a gold stylographic pen; and Lely explained that he would later supply a congruous background out of his own head.

Carl Carson, who was quite shrewd enough to suspect a hinted satirical intention in all this, advanced on Lely's easel without cordiality and removed a cloth.

‘There it is,' he said. ‘As far as it goes, that's to say.'

‘And it goes jolly well,' Pluckworthy exclaimed cheerfully. He was studying the unfinished portrait with proper attention. ‘It's going to be you, Carl, right down to the ground.'

‘We'll hope so,' Carson said. He didn't, as a matter of fact, know whether he
did
hope so. And, obscurely, he hadn't quite liked his assistant's form of words. ‘For it's due to cost a packet,' he added with gloom.

Pluckworthy laughed abruptly – presumably as scorning this paltry consideration.

‘But isn't it marvellous?' he asked, turning to Cynthia. ‘Take it from me: the whole soul of the man is going to transpire on that canvas.' Then, as if aware that this mocking magniloquence had taken him too far, he quietened down. He looked puzzled. He frowned. ‘Do you know?' he said. ‘It seems to remind me of somebody. But I can't think who.'

‘Of Robin!' Cynthia breathed.

‘Well, yes – I expect there's that. But I haven't yet met your son, have I? It must be of somebody else.'

‘Of me, it's to be hoped – if we're to get our money's worth.' Carson said this quite crossly. ‘The bloody thing's called a portrait, isn't it?'

‘Again – well, yes. But surely…' Pluckworthy broke off, and his frown deepened. ‘Me!' he said suddenly. ‘It reminds me of
me
. Elusively, of course. But the me I see in my own photographs.'

Not unnaturally, this occasioned a moment's silence in the attic. It was Carson's first thought that the young man had produced this sudden and bizarre statement preparatory to making a ludicrous but scandalous claim upon him: declaring, in fact, that he was his employer's bastard son and entitled to cash in upon the fact. For a wild moment, Carson even wondered whether this could conceivably be true. He had no sooner seen that it could not than he came by a less disconcerting but yet faintly disturbing perception. There was a certain validity in what Pluckworthy had said. Between Carson's portrait as it was evolving itself on the canvas and the young man now staring at it a fortuitous resemblance did exist. Pluckworthy might look rather like this when he was turned fifty. Alternatively, Lely's work suggested that Carson might have looked rather like Pluckworthy twenty-five years ago. In addition to which, there was the further corollary – whimsical, indeed – that if Robin Carson had existed he might have been not unlike the young man now gaping at Robin's putative father's portrait.

But the thing was elusive, as Pluckworthy himself had said. There was nothing striking about it. All that it need have suggested was the reflection that Peter Pluckworthy must have had his own photographic image much at his command. Carson, however, found himself otherwise affected. It might have been said of him that – like the boy who springs up from his knees in Robert Browning's poem – he had been stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

‘Perhaps so,' Carson said – casually, but favouring his assistant with a hard look the while. ‘However, you needn't go round prating about it. And now, we'll get you a drink, and you'd better be off. But don't, in the next day or two, find yourself too far from your telephone. I'll be contacting you.'