Five Roundabouts to Heaven (5 page)

Thus they would sit in silence for a few moments; aunt Rose, untidily dressed, but intense and forceful; and aunt Emily dressed in her eternal bits and pieces, and black earrings, her cow-like eyes, utterly credulous, fixed watchfully on the glass.

Fortunately the spirits never kept them waiting long, largely because they knew, no doubt, that aunt Rose had so much work to do on her case.

I remember the last time I ever saw aunt Rose at work. It was a remarkably fine exhibition.

Aunt Emily had said she had not a penny more to spare for the moment. Not a penny. So after a tactful interval aunt Rose suggested having a turn with the glass. Aunt Emily could never resist it, though she ought to have known by bitter experience exactly what was going to be the end of it.

After the usual short wait, aunt Emily said, in her nervous way:

“Is anybody there? Who is there?”

For a second or two the glass remained immobile while aunt Emily stared raptly into space, her face twisted into the sort of welcoming smile which she imagined a spirit on a short visit to Bayswater might find reassuring. Then the tumbler began to move hesitatingly from letter to letter and spelt out: F-A-T-H-E-R.

“It’s Father!” cried aunt Rose triumphantly. He was, I may add, a frequent astral caller at the Bayswater house.

“Well, well,” said aunt Emily, trying to keep her voice normal, “what do you want, Father? Are you and Mother happy?”

The glass, gaining confidence, moved quickly.

“Y-U-S,” spelt out aunt Emily in a puzzled tone.

“He means ‘Yes,’ ” whispered aunt Rose, quickly separating the U and the E a little more, and replacing her fingers on the glass.

“B-U-T,” said Father, “I A-M,” and paused to think.

“What are you, Father?” asked aunt Emily.

“W-A-R-R-I-E-D.”

“Warried?” Aunt Emily looked at aunt Rose.

“Worried,” said aunt Rose. “Father’s worried. Why are you worried, Father?”

At this stage, aunt Emily should have been the one to be worried, but she never was. She just rushed blindly on to her fate. The answer was always the same:

“R-O-S-E’S C-A-S-E.”

“Rose’s Case,” said aunt Rose, and gave her sister a significant look. It was too late for aunt Emily to back out now without gross disrespect to the dead.

“H-E-L-P,” said Father succinctly, and added: “C-A-S-E W-I-L-L B-E W-O-N S-O-O-N.”

“Isn’t that wonderful!” whispered aunt Rose. But that was not the end; the sting was in the tail, and the glass now moved quickly and surely.

“M-O-N-E-Y N-E-E-D-E-D F-A-M-I-L-Y M-U-

S-T S-T-A-N-D F-O-U-R S-Q-U-A-R-E T-O-G-E-

T-H-E-R.”

“How shall we get the money, Father?” asked aunt Emily though she ought to have known. Father seemed to try tactfully to side-step this for a moment, as though to break it gently. He just said: “F-I-G-H-T S-H-O-U-L-D-E-R T-O S-H-O-U-L-

D-E-R,” and was silent. It was as though he were brooding deeply over the whole problem.

Then, apparently having made up his mind, he added starkly: “E-M-I-L-Y M-U-S-T S-E-L-L S-O-M-E S-H-A-R-E-S.” Perhaps because he saw the blank look on aunt Emily’s face he added: “I-F N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y.”

Just occasionally, my parents visited the house, and, once, a rather half-hearted attempt was even made to bounce some money out of my father, but being cynical he remained deaf to astral instructions and no further efforts were made.

Although I never felt sorry for Bartels’ aunt Rose, with her buoyant optimism and continual preoccupation with her great case, I did feel a certain pity for uncle James, her husband, the man around whom the whole case revolved.

He never struck me as having the air of a man who seriously considered himself to have been gravely wronged; indeed, he seemed to regard both the case and the astral messages with a certain good-humoured tolerance. But he was always very cagey when questioned as to his views on both subjects, probably because he held aunt Rose in some awe.

He was a short, well-proportioned man dressed invariably in the style of a country gentleman who had come up to spend an hour or two at Tattersall’s.

He wore loud check suits, usually grey, made of heavy cloth of such superb quality that though they had been made in the late Edwardian period, they still looked new; and on him, somehow, the style still looked smart. He always wore white socks, and, outside the house, grey spats, a brown bowler hat, and carried yellow gloves; his shoes shone like a well-polished Sheraton table. He had fair, thinning hair, a square jaw and straight nose, and keen, merry blue eyes.

One evening I saw uncle James’s car in front of the house; he was polishing the coachwork, whistling and hissing through his teeth like an ostler does when rubbing a horse down after a gallop. It was a very old car, but Bartels’ uncle kept it shining like a new pin.

“Hello, uncle James,” I said. He looked up.

“Hello, Peter!” He roared with laughter. He had the social habit common to his generation of going off into peals of loud laughter if he met somebody unexpectedly.

“How are you?” he said in his loud, cheerful voice. “Phil’s out at the moment, but he’ll be back soon.”

We chatted for a while and then made our way to the dreary expanse of coarse grass and dark green foliage behind the house, and walked up and down, discussing the sort of garden he would like to have, the vagaries of his car, and the scarcity of money, while a grimy-looking tabby cat sat on the wall dreaming of the infinite.

“How’s the case?” I asked at length.

“I believe Rose is up to some new dodge or other. This new lawyer fella was no good after all. Ah, well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he added.

“It certainly is.”

“I’d like to have a day out hunting before I die, I must say. I get tired of being the poor relation, Pete.”

He paused to light his pipe, sucking in the smoke with short, vigorous puffs, so that in a few seconds there was a thick cloud of acrid blue smoke around him.

It seemed odd that a man who had had charge of the destinies of a great regiment, who had been a local god to a thousand men, should be pacing up and down a seedy garden in Bayswater, dreaming of one last day out with the hounds before he died. He longed for a job, and it seemed to him bewildering that though he was over sixty, and untrained in anything except war, nobody would offer him one.

To the end of his days he never gave up hope, either of a job or of a last day’s hunting. He got neither, of course.

Uncle James helped daily with the housework, tended the garden, carried the coals, chopped wood, cleaned the shoes, and pressed his own clothes; he was always as immaculately clean as in the days when a batman had looked after him.

When she occasionally grew fretful about handing out money in accordance with Father’s wishes from Beyond, aunt Emily would sometimes suggest that her sister’s one spare room could be used to house a rich lodger. Doubtless she envisaged some old recluse, full of years and money, who would eventually die and leave them his fortune. But aunt Rose said it would be “bad for James’s nerves,” not that he was ever known to suffer from any.

Looking back now over the years, I see they were a cheerful, feckless couple who wasted their substance chasing a mirage; who fed well, and were never without a bottle of whisky in the house; who ran up bills which they could not pay, and believed that the world owed them a living.

But they were sweethearts from the day they met until the day when death came to aunt Rose, and the dustman eventually carted away the vast accumulation of papers in the case that aunt Rose never won, and never could have won, had she lived to be a hundred.

I smile when I think of them, Bartels’ aunt Rose, aunt Emily and uncle James; time has erased from the memory such blemishes of character as they may have had, and wiped out the recollections of the inevitable little acrimonious squabbles which arose between them.

They were kind to Philip Bartels, they were genuinely fond of him, but that is as far as it went. Aunt Emily was too occupied with her stocks and shares and her tenants, and aunt Rose was too occupied fighting the legal scoundrel, and rogues who declined to work for her without payments to develop any real love of him.

Even uncle James never really took to him, for Bartels had never hunted, never showed much interest in the Army as a career, and at that time did not know one end of a shotgun from another.

That, then, was the boyhood background of the man the cool-brained Beatrice married, the girl whose arrival at the château was followed, appropriately, as it now seems, by one of the most violent thunderstorms in the history of the Sologne area.

Few lives are completely tragic or even sombre. Bartels’ boyhood had its amusing side, even its ludicrous moments, but he was too young fully to appreciate them.

In retrospect his youth seems, on the whole, not unpleasant. There have been many worse. But it did him no good, no good at all. Bartels needed more emotional warmth than he could ever find at 257 Melville Avenue; more, too, than Beatrice Wilson could ever give him, either before or after they were married.

B
rooding
in the woods above the château where Bartels and I had been so happy, I was compelled to admit to myself that I had played my cards cleverly in the events which occurred all those years later.

I concealed my part in the Bartels’ affair so well that I know for certain that on the February night when, for him, the world burst into flames and fell in ruins, the thoughts which he entertained for me were still those of a friend.

His actions proved it.

So much the better. I am glad to think that to the burden of his fear there was not added the bitterness of one who thinks he has been betrayed.

I don’t say that the role I played was a noble one. It was not. Where things of the heart are concerned men mostly become selfish. But although my actions had been dictated by my own interests, I had for long been in doubt as to whether I need entirely reproach myself for the course which I took.

I had argued that I had acted, at first, perfectly legitimately, and that by the time the moment for sacrifice had arrived, only a saint could have found the strength to make it.

If you lead a normal life in a town such as London, if you can call town life normal, which I doubt, you can get away from your conscience to some extent. I could, anyway. There are plenty of distractions.

But it was different when I was back there that evening.

When you go back, as I did, and see the ghosts, and one ghost in particular, and see him as he was, and remember all that happened in later years, you come face to face with yourself.

Arguments which have formerly held good begin to fall away. Doubts creep in, slimily, from behind, and you’ve got to round on them and grab them by the throat and throttle them, if you can, or they trample you down.

So the truth begins to emerge.

A
fter I had left the château I went to Germany and Italy, to learn the languages of those countries. I worked in hotels at home and abroad, on the Continent and in America, for although my father had a comfortable position in mind for me when I knew the hotel business, he was determined that I should go through the mill first.

I worked in every department which you can find in a big hotel, doing both manual work and office work, for my father, who had built his business the hard way, had no mind to have it wrecked some day by a dilettante.

It was hard, but I enjoyed it, meeting many types of men, and almost as many different types of women. But I rarely stayed more than a few months in each place, and, since there is safety in numbers, the attractions of one girl had hardly begun to impress me before I left; and the charms of her successor, I must own, proved scarcely less acceptable.

I had lost Ingrid, for reasons which it is unnecessary to outline, and thereafter I remained comparatively free.

It was not so with Bartels.

We wrote to each other fairly often, and in due course I learnt that he had gone into the wine trade, as envisaged, that after a period in a London office he had toured the well-known vineyards, and finally he had gone out on the road to sell his wares.

It is not fair to mention here the name of the firm for which he worked, but it had a reasonable reputation, and with the small income he inherited from his parents, and what he made by way of commission, he had an adequate income, at the age of twenty-six, upon which to marry.

So he married. He married Beatrice Wilson, and invited me formally to the wedding, though I was at that time in America. And when I heard the news I wondered why Beatrice Wilson, that attractive, witty, and intelligent girl, should have married little frog-faced Bartels; even though he did have a certain charm, and a slow and melodious voice.

I spent most of the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but I was lucky, and returned to London in comparatively good health, in 1946. As my parents were at that time living in Bucking-hamshire, I sought and was fortunate enough to find a small modern furnished flat in Kensington High Street, and soon after my return, I telephoned Bartels at his office, not knowing whether he was dead or alive.

There was no mistaking the slow, deep voice which answered the phone, and which contrasted so curiously with his slender frame. He sounded genuinely delighted to hear from me. I agreed to go to dinner with him and Beatrice the following night, and when we learnt that we were living within a few minutes’ walk of each other we were as pleased as Punch.

It seemed that our old boyhood friendship would be renewed, and indeed for three years and more this proved to be the case. It was a happy time for me. I had work, friends, my darkroom in my flat, where I carried out photographic experiments.

I was delighted to see that, despite certain misgivings I had had, to all outward appearances the marriage was a success.

Beatrice was a splendid housewife. She was still extremely good-looking and seemed contented and happy. Her parents had bought for her a small cottage near Balcombe, in Sussex, and in the summer months they would go down there for long weekends. I often went with them.

They had a pleasant circle of friends, both in London and in Sussex, and if I sometimes thought that Bartels was quieter than he used to be, I formed the opinion that this was because he had not been very well treated by his firm.

It was, of course, the old story of the man who goes to the war—in his case, the African campaign, Italy, and Germany—and who returns to find that others have been promoted in his absence. They gave him his job back—on the road—but they pointed out, with a regret which might have been genuine, that in the present state of the wine trade they could do no more.

Bartels was not as young as he had been, and I think he felt it deeply. Moreover, good wine was not, at first, easily obtainable; and at first, being expensive, was difficult to sell.

But Beatrice had a small allowance for her clothes, and Bartels had his modest private income, so that despite everything, they managed to live reasonably. Bartels, who was of Dutch origin as his name suggests, stuck tenaciously to his selling, even though it involved an absence from home of two or three nights a week.

I spent very many happy evenings with the Bartels and with their friends. There was Fred Manders, who was an architect, and his wife, Joyce; James Murray, an insurance chap; Bill and Margaret Barnet—he was something in a textile firm; and in the country there were the Derbyshires, who had a small-holding which they farmed in a desultory kind of way; Major and Mrs Godfrey, who did nothing in particular; John O’Brien, an Irish solicitor, who lived nearby in a cottage by himself and travelled up and down to town each day, and one or two others. Of them all, I liked John O’Brien best. He was a heavily built, jovial man in his middle thirties, with dark hair and blue eyes and a pugnacious jaw.

When I first met him, he was already contemplating taking silk, and I formed the impression, and later events confirmed it, that with his good looks and Irish charm and wit he would go far at the Bar.

He lived in the country, primarily because he was passionately devoted to St Bernard dogs, of which he had three. I frequently gave him a lift to town in my car, and on Sundays, when the Bartels were down there, he generally came in for a meal or a few drinks.

We all liked John O’Brien. I still do.

I had an open invitation to go down to Balcombe any weekend I liked, with or without warning. All that I needed to do, they said, was to drive up to the door. I often did. My room was always ready. Such was the closeness of the bonds between myself and Philip and Beatrice Bartels.

So things remained for a period, which in retrospect seems like that sunny windless day when Beatrice arrived at the château and entered the life of Philip Bartels; the day which ended, so suddenly, in the gathering of the storm clouds and the rending of the sky by thunder and lightning and rain.

Even when the first crack appeared, I was, at first, merely surprised and saddened. It began on 12 February, when he telephoned me at my office, and invited me to lunch at the Café Royal, saying that he had something he wished to tell me.

I was rather busy that morning, and tried to stall him off.

“It all depends upon what you want to tell me,” I remember I answered cautiously.

He hesitated. “It is something you ought to know,” he replied at last.

“Can’t you make it tomorrow? I’ve got a hell of a lot of work to cope with.”

“It’s no good tomorrow. I really do want to see you today, alone.” Although he spoke in that slow, strong voice which contrasted so much with his appearance, I detected a note of genuine urgency in his tone.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come.”

“See you in the cocktail lounge at one o’clock—upstairs. No, make it twelve thirty.”

“Don’t be silly. I told you I’ve got a lot of work.”

“It’ll be pointless if you don’t come at twelve thirty.”

I hesitated again. “What the hell is it about?”

“I can’t tell you on the phone.”

I thought: Oh well, I suppose I can make up the time this evening.

“All right, then. Twelve thirty. I hope it’s worth it, that’s all.”

“It’ll be worth it. I’m glad you can make it. It’s very important to me, Peter. I want your opinion.”

I took a taxi, and arrived very punctually, but he was already seated on one of the settees, and had ordered my usual gin and tonic.

Looking at him, as I walked towards him, I thought he had not changed much over the years. He was still meagrely built, whereas I had put on too much weight. There was the same wide, gentle smile. But recently he had seemed more withdrawn, at any rate when in the company of people other than myself; ironically, he trusted me implicitly.

When with other people there was a faintly enigmatic air about him. In addition to his slow, deliberate, almost tired way of speaking, he had acquired an equally deliberate way of thinking for some seconds before answering a question; and while he was thinking, he would sometimes look at you with a sardonic smile, not on his lips or even in his eyes—it was not as noticeable as that—but rather behind his eyes. It was as if he were amused, not at you, but at certain remote implications behind your question.

I put it down to the experiences, the rebuffs, which he had had “on the road.” He was not a very successful traveller for his wine firm. Had he not had a private income, he would have been hard put to it to live as he did.

The impression you had, in those days, was of one who had schooled himself to accept the disappointments of life with a kind of amused contemplation. It was as though he were patiently awaiting the end of some phase or other, before proceeding on to some unspecified destiny.

It was a queer sort of attitude, and I should say that it was hardly conducive to persuading hard-bitten wine merchants to part with their money.

He joined me in a vague toast to our mutual health, and said nothing for some moments, but sat picking at a cigarette end in the ashtray with a used match. I asked him how business was, and he said it might be worse.

I looked around the room, knowing it was useless to hurry him.

The place was filling up rapidly. Across the room three bald men were drinking cocktails. They were obese, and sat huddled forward, round a little table, their knees apart to ease the weight of their stomachs. They were animated and joking, and at the all-jolly-good-fellows stage. Later, the masks would drop, and they would get down to business.

Suddenly Bartels asked me about his wife. It was the last sort of question I anticipated.

He said: “Do you like Beatrice? I mean, are you fond of her?”

“Of course I like her,” I said. “Of course I’m fond of her. She’s a dam’ good scout. Why?”

He nodded, as though he expected the answer, as well he might have done; you are hardly likely, whatever you think, to tell your best friend that you dislike his wife.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I’m fond of her, too. That’s the devil of it.”

“A lot of men are quite fond of their wives. I’m told it’s a mild kind of complaint, like chickenpox. You’ll probably get over it. But it may take time.”

He didn’t smile. He looked across the room and said: “Well, I’m going to leave Beatrice, Peter. I thought I had better tell you. I thought you ought to know.”

I have always prided myself on not showing dismay. I admire the Roman Catholic priest who said in the confessional: “You have committed murder, my son? Well, how many times?” So I took a pull at my gin and tonic, and replaced the glass on the table, and said as casually as I could:

“Oh? Why? Why are you going to leave Beatrice?”

“Because I want to be happy.”

“That’s reasonable.”

He gulped down his drink, and signalled to the waiter. But I said: “This one is on me,” and gave the order, though my own glass was still half full. When the waiter had taken the order I asked the obvious question:

“Well, what’s her name?”

“What’s whose name?”

I knew he was fencing, and he knew that I knew it. I suppose it was a kind of conventional approach.

“The name of the woman you’ve fallen for,” I said. “I know you and Beatrice well enough to know that your marriage is not an unhappy one. As a matter of fact, as marriages go, I always thought it was rather satisfactory. Who is she? And do I know her?”

“Lorna is her name,” said Bartels, still fiddling with the match-stick. “Lorna Dickson. You haven’t met her.”

I said nothing. When I said that I was fond of Beatrice, I was speaking the strict truth; and when Bartels said that he was still very fond of her, I knew that he was speaking the truth, too. Beatrice had turned into a fine character. She was intelligent and witty; loyal to her own people; conscientious and hard-working; she obviously had a passionate disposition; and with it all, she was, as I’ve said, still remarkably good-looking in a red-haired, fair-skinned sort of way. She was also a really first-class cook.

So all in all, I couldn’t see that Bartels had much to grumble about.

It seemed to me perfectly clear that this Dickson woman was a floozy who had caught Bartels on the hop, at that period of a marriage when one or other of the partners is often ripe for a change. I had seen more intelligent, more sober-minded men than Bartels go down before that sort of thing; and live to regret it, too. But I knew it would be bad tactics to show opposition.

“Is she very good-looking?” I asked.

“To me, she is. To me she is beautiful. Other people might not think so.”

Still continuing on my tack of showing no fundamental opposition I said: “Well, if you feel deeply enough, you’ll have to do as you plan. Beatrice will take it hardly.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“No doubt she’ll get over it,” I said.

“No doubt.”

A silence fell between us.

The waiter brought the second round of drinks. When he had given me my change and gone, I said:

“How long have you known Laura?”