Perfect Gallows (14 page)

It was pure stage—a scene from a Pinero comedy. Everything said so, the lighting, the way the artist had moved the walls of the room as easily as if they'd been flats, and the characters displaying their features in one direction, all (except the nearly invisible Samuel) with that controlled exaggeration which actors adopt to make the audience grasp their inwardness. The artist had put that in, of course, not the sitters. He'd decided to paint Lady Wragge's anxious would-be beauty, May's self-centred appeal, Elspeth's earnest but frustrated eagerness, Sir Arnold's cynicism and aggression, and Charles's … Charles's what? The face was firmly enough drawn but was itself weak, with something of the mother's fret, something of the father's spite, but no real signposts about what sort of man the boy was going to become, as though the artist had actually guessed he wasn't going to become anything.

It was a very clever picture, Andrew thought. In a funny way it reminded him of the Dame's monologue the night Mum had been killed. The slave's contempt … the painter's contempt for his paymaster. The faces were likenesses, prettified or handsomised but not beyond recognition; the glamour of wealth was there, everything Sir Arnold had asked for. The contempt was hidden, for strangers to perceive.

“I suppose they might be interested to be told that Sargent also painted Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. We are, after all, as
nouveau
as people like that. If you were to inherit, you would be only the fourth generation.”

“Sir Arnold told me …”

“You need pay no attention to that. It is possible that you are already named in his will—he has never told us anything about its provisions, except that we are to have Charles Street. I should be perfectly contented with that, though I doubt if May would. I am sure that there is no question of Father leaving either of us this house. Perhaps it would have been different if one had married, but now, mercifully, we are past that possibility. I must say, Andrew, I most earnestly hope that you will be the beneficiary. It would smooth your path so enormously not to need to worry about money, to be able to take only those parts which are worthy of your talents.”

“I want to do everything.”

“Ah, no. There is so little time in life. You must concentrate only on the best. You have so much to give, Andrew. You must not waste it on second-rate things. All my life I have fought and fought not to waste my own small talent, and in spite of the difficulties I might have achieved something. If it had not been for this dreadful war. People were just beginning to take my productions seriously. I had such plans. We were going to run special trains to our 1940 season. Ah, well … I suppose we must get on. You might well conclude by taking them down through the woodland garden and showing them the dovecote.”

She had turned as she was speaking and was now leaning against the folded shutter of the window with one hand on its sill in a pose of hopeless yearning, and gazing across the young barley of the lower park towards the woods beyond. On the right of the view, further down the slope, rose the curious tower with its primitive drum crowned by its fancy top-knot.

“Now that is genuinely old,” said Cousin Brown. “The lower part was a working dovecote from the sixteenth century—the mechanism for harvesting the squabs is interesting, but you must try not to let anyone swing on the ladder. Young men find it a great temptation but it disturbs the doves. The owner of the old house added the gazebo in the eighteenth century, for reasons of his own. You can get the key from Samuel.”

By the time he found there might be nobody coming on the tours Andrew had begun to look forward to them. He wanted to see whether he could hold an audience with the thin material he had to offer, so on impulse he went up to the camp. It was mid-afternoon and raining. The tannoy was playing “Oh what a beautiful morning” for the third time that day. A different soldier was at the gate but reading what looked like the same magazine and chewing as if on the same gum. Sergeant Stephens was in his cave, but now a corporal was working at the second desk and at the third sat a blonde WAC, pretty in a big-featured busty way. The clatter of her typewriter competed with the rattle of rain on the hut roof.

“Jesus,” said Sergeant Stephens. “Why come to me? I'm Supply.”

“I thought you might tell me who to ask. I mean, is there an entertainments officer?”

“Sure. Lieutenant Dooley—Entertainments, Sport and Sanitation.”

“Thanks. Over at the main camp?”

“Hold it. You won't get to first base with Dooley. He'd sooner be fighting you Brits than the Krauts.”

“He might be interested in the plumbing. It's, well, lavish.”

The sergeant took the joke for serious. His thin but mobile lips tilted his cigar back and up, a gesture expressing calculation. Andrew had seen it so often at the flicks that he was amused to find it in real life. He guessed the sergeant was sketching possible moves in the game he played against the officers, looking for small advantages.

“OK,” he said. “Leave it to me. How many passengers will you want?”

“Oh … about twenty at a time? Fewer if you like.”

“Right, three tours of twenty, fourteen hundred hours, Tuesday through Thursday.”

“Thank you very much.”

The tours went rather well. Anything was better than the boredom of the camp. The men brought cameras, and photographed everything with each other in front of it. Sergeant Stephens came on all three, thus adding point to the joke Andrew had prepared about the painter of the family portrait. The second time he brought a flash-gadget for his camera, so that he could do interiors, and Andrew was gratified to find himself talking without a blink or stumble through the brief astounding glare. Last of all they trooped down through the woodland garden, where windflowers and primroses were sprinkled under the first bright leaves, and then out along a farm track to the dovecote. Sergeant Stephens marshalled the men into groups of six and sent them up the narrow spiral stair while Andrew held forth.

It was a drum inside as well as out. The nest-boxes covered the wall from shoulder-level almost to the ceiling. The only light came through two rows of flight-holes which ran all the way round above and below the boxes. The floor was a shallow funnel with a hole in the middle, the idea being that every couple of months somebody would come and shovel the bird droppings down the slope into the space below, where they rotted down to manure for the gardens, but because of the war nobody seemed to have done this for a year or more, and the centre of the floor was several inches deep in muck. The projecting nest-boxes left a narrow strip almost clear of droppings round the edge of the heap, so Andrew got his six hearers to crouch there while he showed them how the dovecote worked.

The principle was that you harvested the young doves just before they learnt to fly. To get at the nest-boxes you climbed a ladder which slanted up close beside them and was fastened top and bottom to a couple of beams which pivoted round a central pole, so that standing on the ladder you could push your way round, reaching into box after box and taking the birds out to see if they were big enough to eat. It still worked, though Cousin Brown said that the dovecote hadn't been used for meat since the Wragges had been there, even during the wars. Their menus were adjusted to pheasant, partridge, woodcock and quail. Pigeon, she said, was highly indigestible. But Lady Wragge had stocked the dovecote with white ornamental birds and until the war one of the young gardeners had gone regularly through the nests to take out and destroy any young cross-breds of wild birds, so the ladder had been kept in good repair. But it was so covered with droppings—Andrew had scraped the bottom few rungs clean for his demonstration—that there was no danger of the young men—in their best uniform for the tour through a rich folks' house and in any case a lot more fastidious than Tommies might have been—giving in to the temptation to swing on it and disturb the doves. The doves, in fact, were very little put out by these visits. By no means all the nest-boxes were full, but a few birds would be perching on sills as Andrew appeared out of the stair door and these would either duck out of sight or flip across the gloom to a flight-hole and be gone. Their whiteness made the moment beautiful.

When the third tour ended and Andrew had bolted the ladder back into its fixed position with its foot close by the door he stayed for a moment to catch the doves' return. As usual his imagination started to shape a piece of theatre into the space. It would have to be film, of course. The camera looking up, as he was. A girl on the ladder—peasant dress, but lots of leg. Everything foreshortened. The white doves whirring past. Sunlight slanting through the flight-holes, making the roof invisible. The girl looking down, happy, excited, saying something, not noticing that up beyond something … a trapdoor, slowly opening.

It was as though his imaginative power had by its magic caused the thing to happen. Not that the trapdoor opened, but it was there, just discernible in the planking of the shadowed ceiling. Of course it would have to be, now he thought of it. You'd need to get into that silly structure on top, even if it was only there to be looked at from the house. Andrew picked up the piece of broken slate he had used to scrape the lower rungs and slowly climbed the ladder, cleaning the droppings off the rest. The trapdoor wasn't bolted so he pushed it up and climbed through.

From three large arched windows the spring light dazzled in to the bare space. It was an octagon with a rounded ceiling under the outer dome. The windows were very dirty. It was the peeling whitewash which made it seem so bright after the gloom of the dovecote. He looked at the view. Funny—you couldn't see the house from any of the windows, though there was what looked like a window in that direction on the outside. It must be false, behind the one blank wall. The other four walls had niches for statues. And the ceiling had been painted. You could see that, where the whitewash had peeled. There was a dove, with a thin-fingered hand reaching or pointing towards it. A foot, too, opposite the blank wall, standing on an odd curved something. Other bits, all as meaningless as scraps of jig-saw.

For all its brightness and its nearness to the house (you could see the dovecote from all the front rooms) the octagonal space seemed extraordinarily secret and remote—an eyrie on a crystal cliff, waiting for its nest. Andrew looked slowly round.

Yes, he thought. We'll need something to lie on, of course.

May, June 1944

ONE

A
ndrew's first thought was that it oughtn't to have happened that way. A chance for a moment of drama had been muffed. He should have been the first to meet the man—wheeling his bike up the drive on a Sunday evening on his way back to Southampton, and there would have been this stranger wandering down, shabby, battered, but with a soldier's spine, looking about him with wondering vague eyes. The questions, the leap of understanding …

Instead it had all happened while Andrew was off stage.

“My dear boy,

“You will be surprised to receive a letter from me, since we expect to be meeting again in so very few days, but I feel I must warn you that something decidedly startling has happened. As far as you are concerned it seems to me very bad news, though certain things you have said suggest that you may well have mixed feelings on the matter.

“The fact is that a man claiming to be my brother Charles has returned to us, as it were from the dead. He—if it is indeed Charles, but though I have not yet made up my mind it is simplest to write on that assumption—is much altered since we knew him, but then he has lived a very hard life for more than twenty years, having lost his memory in the attack in which he was assumed to have been killed. He still remembers none of that, nor indeed anything much else in his life, either before or for some years after. Until recently his earliest memory was of waking on a park bench in the rain in some northern town and realizing that he did not know who he was. This was some time around 1930, he believes, though he is vague on many matters that are supposedly within his recollection. Since then he has barely survived, doing numerous jobs, obtained one imagines by his being well-spoken and evidently a gentleman, and then lost again.

“So he might have continued, had it not been for this war. He was in Hull in the winter of 1942 when he was caught in an air raid. A bomb landed on the shelter in which he had taken refuge, killing half the occupants and burying the rest alive. By the time he was dug out he was in a poor way and was taken to hospital. While there he began to have a series of what he calls visions. He is unable to explain how these differed from ordinary dreams, except in their vividness, and the way they remained with him after he woke. Nothing happened in the dreams, except that he saw certain objects—a stuffed stag behind a billiard-table, a round tower standing in a green field with a structure like a greenhouse on top, a picture of a negro carrying a silver tray into a room, besides two or three other things less remarkable to those who know this house. Both while having them and afterwards he was convinced of the reality of these ‘visions', and furthermore he asserts that from the very first time one occurred he became aware of his own real name, Charles Arthur Wragge.

He made some attempt to interest his doctors and others in his ‘visions' but was unable to get them taken seriously. He simply wandered about, surviving by begging (he seems to have neither ration-book nor identity card). In some ways this is the hardest part of his story to credit—I do not remember seeing a tramp since the beginning of this war. Be that as it may, some two months back he entered a public library to keep warm, and so as not to be ejected pretended to be reading a newspaper. His eye happened to be caught by a name in a company report: Father's name.

It took him some weeks to discover where we lived and then to make his way here and nerve himself to face us. He came, he says, not for the money but to try to ascertain the truth about himself, and especially whether anything in this house coincided with the details of his “visions”. The American sentry at the door sent him round to the kitchen entrance and Mary Jane came out and talked to him. Quite properly, she sent for me.

“I was not at first much impressed, but having heard him out I took him by way of experiment up to Mother's Boudoir and stood him at the window. He was silent for some while, though he betrayed signs of considerable agitation. Then he said, speaking like a man in a trance, so low I could barely catch the words, ‘The ladder went round and round'.

Now, when we were small girls Charles used to steal the key of the dovecote and make us climb the ladder, with him at the bottom, and set it spinning, fast as he could drive it, with the doves whirling out around us. I can remember his laughter and May's screams echoing together. Unfortunately I was not able to test this particular memory further, as May, who was in the room at the time, immediately blurted the story out. She, I may say, appears to have decided that there is no question but that the man is Charles. Father has been poorly and has refused to see him. I myself waver. Certain things that he says and does, such as the moment when he first saw the dovecote, seem utterly convincing, others less so. We have of course sent for the lawyers, but unfortunately the active partners in the Winchester firm are away fighting and our affairs are in the hands of old Mr Oyler, who is somewhat past the responsibility.

“We have also to consider the problem of Charles's wife, who is now as you know in Australia. Since she has remarried, and that marriage would become bigamous should this man indeed prove to be Charles, we have thought it kindest not to worry her until we stand on firmer ground.

“I tell you all this, of course, so that you may give yourself time (wartime mail services permitting) to consider your own position before you see us on Friday. I need hardly tell you whose side I would be on, should it come to a contest. May I at least advise you not to commit yourself in any way (tho' as a minor you may not be legally free to do so) until you have yourself consulted solicitors. Mutton and Boot in Bargate are I believe a very good firm, if their office still stands after the bombs.

“Yours affctntly,

“Elspeth Wragge”

Wartime mail services permitted, just. The letter had come by the Friday post and Andrew found it when he went back to his lodgings to change out of his school uniform and leave his books. He read it through twice, and then tried to do as Cousin Brown said and consider his position while he cycled the twenty-four miles out to The Mimms.

It was mid-May now, pasture and plough and woodland all green as salad, and the underwoods smoky or skyey where the sun dappled through on to the bluebells. Cousin Brown had drawn him a map of a route along bye-lanes, safer she thought than the main roads with their thundering convoys of tanks and lorries; but now, as if brought on by the same forces as the uprush of summer growth, the pressure of armies round the ports increased every day until it was more than the main roads could hold and it squeezed itself out into narrower and yet narrower lanes, clogging them with grumbling khaki monsters. The pressure was not just physical. The whole landscape was tense with it, vibrated with it, with the churn of big engines, the rattle of tank-tracks, the scurry of despatch-riders, the clank clank of a mechanic repairing a Bren-gun-carrier in a farm gateway … the busy hammers closing rivets up.

June, the GI at the camp had said. The first week, General Odway had hinted to Cousin Blue. The tensions gathered not just to the focus of the ports but also to a point in time, a few days, less than a month. Their energies seemed to suck everything in to that moment. Andrew, pumping his way up the hills, was a fleck, a straw, a gnat, battling against the whirl of the vortex. He almost felt, as you do in a nightmare, that at any moment the new bike would melt away and he would be plodding hopelessly towards ever-more-distant safety. When Cousin Brown had quoted the bit about the hammers last week-end he had of course pictured himself playing the king, musing alone and noble through his sleeping army. Now, with the real armies jostling round him, he couldn't get out of his mind the image of Bardolph, rubbed out of the script unnoticed, hanged off-stage.

The nightmare made it impossible to think about Cousin Brown's letter. He still believed that he didn't want The Mimms, and its immense fortune, but in spite of what he had always told himself he had found that he would prefer to miss out on the noble poverty too. The comforts of his new existence—the lodgings Cousin Brown had found for him, the allowance she gave him, the good-as-new-bike with its five-speed gear and drop handles—were well worth having, but it wasn't just that. Money gave you a sort of psychic space around you. You didn't have to spend your time jostling among the sweaty and anxious. You moved on a larger stage. He would like something out of Uncle Vole's will. Cousin Brown, though, seemed to be asking him to choose between having nothing and having everything. He couldn't make up his mind.

About six miles from The Mimms the lane dipped through beech-woods, crossed a main road and began to climb the last long hill before running along an undulating ridge and finally dropping to the valley that held the house. An immense ammunition dump filled the woods by the crossroads, long stacks of shells and ammo-boxes stretching away out of sight between the pale grey tree-trunks. Andrew had come to regard this as a landmark, an almost-there point. Just this one more hill. The main road was busy as anywhere, but beyond it the pressure of armies dwindled and he could think. He pushed both the nightmare and Cousin Brown's letter out of his mind and thought instead about Jean.

Last Sunday he had kissed her for the first time, leaning yokel-fashion across the stile below the farm, pretending to be old-man-exhausted after the scamper up through the plantation, barring her way without seeming to; then moving on with rehearsed naturalness to complain about having to ride all the way back to Southampton.

“O, most dear mistress, the sun will set before I shall discharge what I must strive to do.”

That had been Adrian/Ferdinand, as he helped her across the stile. A pause, looking into her eyes, still in the part, then Adrian alone—quizzical­, amused, professionally condescending.

“You'll have to practise a bit, you know.”

She had waited, hypnotized, and let him put his arm round her shoulders and then break the spell by a brief brushing of lips, absolutely unfrightening. He had let go before she could push him away, laughing at the fun of play-acting the lover. She had begun to laugh too—with relief, mainly.

As Cousin Brown had said, he was going to have to be extremely sensitive how he proceeded. Keep the momentum up, but not hurry or scare her. More “practice” this week-end. At the stile again, but a bit longer? See what offered. Saturday after, if it was the right kind of flick, take her to the back rows. Then … Then it would be almost June. Amusing if he could beat the invasion to it. But not essential.

“This is Andrew,” said Cousin Blue. “Andrew, this is your cousin Charles. My brother, you know.”

“How do you do, sir?”

Andrew shook the trembling hand. The man frowned.

“Andrew?” he murmured.

His tweed jacket and grey flannels were slightly too small for him, though he was only a couple of inches taller than Andrew. Out of Uncle Vole's wardrobe, of course—he'd have sold or lost his clothing coupons, if he ever had any. Andrew had expected him to be bald, like Uncle Vole, but he wore his silvery hair brushed back over the ears. His face was mottled and veined, purple over the bridge of the thin nose, and his mouth stayed slightly open in repose, as though he were about to drag it down in a grimace like poor Brian's, but he spoke perfectly clearly, though in a tone of bewilderment.

“The other branch,” said Cousin Blue. “Don't you remember about Father quarrelling with his brother Oswald before he went to South Africa? I told you again last evening. We found dear Andrew only this Christmas. He is here to help Elspeth put on her little play.”

“Ah. The play. Yes. Of course. So we are long-lost cousins, Andrew. Though I have been lost longer, I suppose. What a rum story.”

“Not a relation for a breakfast, sir,” said Andrew.

The man blinked and shook his head. He looked at his sherry glass.

“But it is … ah … almost time for supper, is it not?”

His voice was baffled, as if he was in a waking dream, where without warning a meal can become a different meal. The headshake had been right too. But the involuntary blink before—had that been different, a response to another sort of ambush?

Cousin Blue laughed. Andrew had never seen her so lively.

“I expect it's a quotation from Tennyson or someone,” she said. “You must not tease poor Charles, Andrew. His memory is coming back, but it is still rather patchy—isn't it, dear?”

“Comes and goes, comes and goes … ah, Elspeth, allow me to introduce your cousin … tsk …”

“Andrew and I are already well acquainted, thank you, Charles. I trust that the bicycle is still behaving.”

“Going like a bird, thanks. Down hill, anyway. I'd have been earlier, but the lanes are crammed with convoys so you keep having to get off and climb into the hedge to let them past.”

“Father is to have supper with us,” said Cousin Brown.

“No!” said Cousin Blue. “Really he can be most trying. Do you know, Andrew, Father has been pretending to be ill and has refused to meet Charles, and now he is going to spring himself on the poor boy over supper.”

“I … I shall be delighted to … er … see him again,” said Charles. “I suppose he is much changed. Not that I remember him clearly. Just a presence I sometimes think I can recall.”

“Now, Andrew,” said Cousin Brown. “I want to talk to you about the rehearsal arrangements. I have the diary over here. If you will excuse us, Charles.”

Andrew followed her to her desk by the further window of the Boudoir and joined in the pretence of looking at the rehearsal schedule. She kept her back to the room but signalled him round to stand sideways so that he could glance across to where the others were talking in front of the fireplace. Cousin May was whispering, her gestures ones of warning. The man reassured, made calming movements with his fingers. Andrew decided not to give him a private name yet. There could only be one Uncle Vole, but Charles might be one of any number of Charleses. He tried to recall the family portrait in the saloon. The face … hard to tell. It had the weakness, but it had been battered by time and poverty and (to judge by the mottlings) drink. The boy's soft nose might have hardened into that beakiness. But the pose was spot on, with the right hand in the trouser pocket and the left holding the empty sherry glass in the exact hesitant gesture of the portrait.