The Ivy Tree (9 page)

I was concentrating hard on what I was saying, and had failed to hear anyone mount the stairs. It was the sudden change in Lisa's impassive, listening face that told me who was at the door.

It was she who called ‘Come in!' before I had even turned my head, and she was on her feet as he entered the room.

I saw then why we had missed hearing the car. He must have walked some distance from the place where he had parked it. His hair, and the tweed of his jacket, were misted with raindrops.

This was my first meeting with him since our strange encounter on the Roman Wall, and I had been half dreading it; but I need not have worried. He greeted me with imperturbable friendliness, and the same unquestioning acceptance of my partnership in his affairs that I had seen in his sister.

If my own greeting was a little uncertain, this went unnoticed in Lisa's exclamation. ‘Con! Is it raining?'

‘I think so, I hardly noticed. Yes, I believe it is.'

‘You believe it is! Why, you're soaking! And no coat on. I suppose you left the car three streets away. Really, Con! Come to the fire, dear.'

I had to stop myself from staring at her in amazement. This was a totally different Lisa from the one I had known up to now. Gone was the silent, stodgy-looking watcher of the Café Kasbah, the single-minded juggernaut of my Westgate Road lodgings, the crisply efficient tutor of the last few days. This was the hen fussing over its chick, or the anxious shepherd with the weakling lamb . . . She had bustled across the room to meet him, had brushed the raindrops from his shoulders with her hands, and drawn him nearer to the fire, almost before the door was shut behind him. She pressed him into the room's best chair, which she had just vacated, then hurried (without so much as a by-your-leave to me) to make fresh tea for him. Con accepted the fuss without even appearing to notice it; he stood patiently while she fluttered round him, as a good child stands still while its mother fusses its clothes into order, took the chair she pointed him to, and the tea she had made for him. It was a totally new facet of Lisa, and an unexpected one. It also went, I thought, quite a long way towards completing the picture of Con that I had had in my own mind.

He was, in his own way, as good a teacher as Lisa. It fell to him to give me some sort of picture of life at Whitescar when Annabel had been there, and to round out, in his own racy, vivid way, the two most important portraits, that of Matthew Winslow, and of the girl herself.

I waited for him to mention the final quarrel, and the night of Annabel's flight. But when he did come to it he added very little to what I had already heard from Lisa. I asked no questions. Time enough when he knew me better. He would have to come to it sooner or later, since the point at which the young Annabel had walked out of her grandfather's life was, obviously, the point at which I came in. But I wondered, increasingly, what reasons he could give me for a ‘lover's quarrel' severe enough to drive a girl to three thousand miles of flight, and years of silence.

The explanation was, in fact, left to my last ‘lesson' with Lisa.

This fell on the Thursday of the third week, and I had not been expecting her. When I opened the door and showed her into my room, I thought that something was ruffling her usually stolid calm, but she took off her gloves and coat with her customary deliberation, and sat down by the fire.

‘I didn't expect you,' I said. ‘Has something happened?'

She sent me a half-glance upwards, in which I thought I could read uneasiness, and even anger. ‘Julie's coming, that's what's happened. Some time next week.'

I sat on the table's edge, and reached for a cigarette. ‘Oh?'

She said sourly: ‘You take it very calmly.'

‘Well, you said you expected her some time during the summer.'

‘Yes, but she's taking her holiday much earlier than we'd expected, and I've a feeling that the old man's asked her to come, and she's getting special leave. He doesn't say so; but I know she
had
originally planned to come in August . . . You see what it means?'

I lit the cigarette deliberately, then pitched the dead match into the fire. (The gold lighter, with its betraying monogram, lay concealed at the bottom of a suitcase.) ‘I see what it might mean.'

‘It means that if we don't get moving straight away, Julie'll have wormed her way into Whitescar, and he'll leave her every penny.'

I didn't answer for a moment. I was thinking that Con, even at his most direct, was never coarse.

‘So you see, this is it,' said Lisa.

‘Yes.'

‘Con says it must mean the old man's a bit more nervous about his health than he's admitted. Apparently Julie wrote to him once or twice while he was ill, and he has written back, I know. I'm sure he must have asked her to come up early, for some reason, and he certainly seems as pleased as Punch that she can get away so soon. She said she'd be here next week, some time, but would ring up and let us know. Normally we'd have had till July or August, and anything,' said Lisa, bitterly, ‘could have happened before then. As it is—'

‘Look,' I said mildly, ‘you don't have to hunt round for motives to frighten yourselves with. Perhaps he does just want to see Julie, and perhaps she does just want to see him. It could be as simple as that. Don't look so disbelieving. People are straightforward enough, on the whole, till one starts to look for crooked motives, and then, oh boy, how crooked can they be!'

Lisa gave that small tight-lipped smile that was more a concession to my tone than any evidence of amusement. ‘Well, we can't take risks. Con says you'll have to come straight away, before Julie even gets here, or heaven knows what Mr Winslow'll do.'

‘But, look, Lisa—'

‘You'll be all right, won't you? I'd have liked another week, just to make certain.'

‘I'm all right. It isn't that. I was going to say that surely Con's barking up the wrong tree with Julie. I don't see how she can possibly be a danger to him, whether she's at Whitescar or not.'

‘All I know is,' said Lisa, a little grimly, ‘that she's as like Annabel as two peas in a pod, and the old man's getting more difficult every day . . . Heaven knows what he might take it into his head to do. Can't you see what Con's afraid of? He's pretty sure Julie's the residuary beneficiary now, but if Mr Winslow alters his Will before Annabel gets home, and makes Julie the principal . . .'

‘Oh yes, I see. In that case, I might as well not trouble to go any further. But is it likely, Lisa? If Grandfather abandons Annabel at last, and re-makes his Will at all, surely, now, it will be in Con's favour? You said Julie's only been to Whitescar for holidays, and she's London bred. What possible prospect—?'

‘That's just the point. Last year, when she was here, she was seeing a lot of one of the Fenwick boys from Nether Shields. It all seemed to blow up out of nothing, and before anyone even noticed it, he was coming over every day, getting on like a house on fire with Mr Winslow, and Julie . . . well,
she
did nothing to discourage him.'

I laughed. ‘Well, but Lisa, what was she? Eighteen?'

‘I know. It's all speculation, and I hope it's nonsense, but you know what a razor's-edge Con's living on, and anything could happen to the old man. Once you're there, things should be safe enough: he'll certainly never leave anything to Julie over
your
head, but as it is – well, she's his son's child, and Con's only a distant relative . . . and he likes Bill Fenwick.'

I regarded the end of my cigarette. ‘And did Con never think to set up as a rival to this Bill Fenwick? An obvious move, one imagines. He tried it with Annabel.'

Lisa stirred. ‘I told you, it never occurred to anyone that she was even adult! She'd just left school! I think Con thought of her as a schoolgirl. Mr Winslow certainly did; the Fenwick affair amused him enormously.'

‘And now she's had a year in London. She'll have probably got further than the boy-next-door stage,' I said cheerfully. ‘You'll find you're worrying about nothing.'

‘I hope so. But once you're there at Whitescar, things will be safe enough for Con. Julie won't be seriously in the way.'

I looked at her for a moment. ‘No. Well, all right. When?'

There, again, was that surreptitious flash of excitement.

‘This weekend. You can ring up on Sunday, as we'd arranged. If you ring up at three, the old man'll be resting, and I'll take the call.'

‘You know, I'll have to see Con again before I come.'

She hesitated. ‘Yes. He – he wanted to come in and see you himself, today, but he couldn't get away. You'll realise there are one or two things . . .' she paused, and seemed to be choosing her words . . . ‘that you still have to be told. We've – well, we've been keeping them back. We wanted to be quite sure, first, that you saw how easy it was all going to be. So I – we—' She stopped.

I didn't help her. I waited, smoking quietly. Here it came at last. She needn't have worried, I thought drily, whatever I'd been telling myself, whatever she had to say, I knew I wouldn't back out now. The moment when I had consented to move my rooms and see Con again, had been the point of no return.

She spoke as if with difficulty. ‘It's the real reason for Annabel's doing as she did, and leaving home. You asked about it before.'

‘Yes. I was beginning to wonder if you knew yourself.'

‘I didn't. Not till recently, not fully.'

‘I see. Well, I'll have to know it all, you must realise that.'

‘Of course. I may as well be honest with you. We
did
deliberately avoid telling you, until you were more or less committed. We didn't want to risk your throwing the whole thing up, just because there was something that was going to make it, not exactly more difficult, but a little awkward.'

‘A little awkward? Lord, Lisa, I thought it must be murder at least, being kept from me so carefully all this time! I confess I've been burning to know. Let's have it, for pity's sake! No, all right, you needn't worry. I'm not throwing anything up at this stage in the proceedings. I couldn't for the life of me pack up and go quietly away, without at least having one look at Whitescar. Besides, I'd feel a fool and a quitter if I did. Silly, considering what it is we're planning to do but there it is. Take it that I am completely committed.'

She gave a little sigh, and the hands stirred in her lap and relaxed. ‘That's what I told Con! The girl's straight, I said, she won't let us down, not now.'

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Sure. Straight as a corkscrew. Try me. Well, let's have your “awkward” news. It's been sticking out a mile that there must have been something extra-special about that last row with Con, doesn't it? What had finally gone wrong?'

That little smile again, tight and secret and – I thought, startled – malignant.

‘Annabel,' she said.

I stopped with the cigarette half way to my lips and stared at her. The pudgy hands lay without moving in her lap, but somehow, now, they looked complacent. ‘Annabel?' I said sharply. ‘I don't follow.'

‘It was a vulgarism, I'm afraid. I shouldn't have allowed myself to use it. I only meant that the girl had played the fool and got herself pregnant.'

‘Yes.'

They say that words make no difference; it isn't true, they make it all. I found I was on my feet, looking, I suppose, as shocked as I felt. ‘Oh, my God,' I said, ‘this is . . . this is . . .' I turned abruptly and went over to the window and stood with my back to her. After a bit I managed to say: ‘I quite see why you didn't tell me sooner.'

‘I thought you would.'

Her voice sounded as calm as ever, but when after a moment or so I turned, it was to see her watching me with a wariness that was almost sharp enough for apprehension. ‘Are you so very shocked?'

‘Of course I'm shocked! Not at the fact, particularly – I should have expected something like that, after the build-up – but at realising, flat out, what I've let myself in for. It didn't seem to be really true, till I heard it in so many words.'

‘Then it had occurred to you? I thought it might. In fact I hoped it might.'

‘Why?'

‘I should say, I hoped it
had
. Then I knew that you'd thought about it, and still decided to go on with this.'

‘Oh lord, yes,' I repeated it almost wearily, ‘I said I would, you needn't worry. I'd look fine, wouldn't I, proposing to lie and cheat my way into the share of a fortune, and then holding up hands of horror at a lapse from grace eight years old.' The setting sun was behind me; she couldn't see me except as a silhouette against the window. I stayed where I was. After a moment or two more, I managed to say, quite evenly: ‘Well? Go on. Did they find out who it was?'

She looked surprised, ‘Why, good heavens, Con, of course!'

‘Well, of course!' She was looking at me in the blankest astonishment. Then her eyes dropped, but I had, for one moment, seen the flash of an emotion more shocking than anything which had passed up to now. ‘Who else?' she asked in a flat colourless voice.

‘Well, but Lisa—!' I stopped, and drew a long steadying breath. ‘Con.' I repeated it softly. ‘My God . . .
Con
.'

There was a very long silence, which Lisa didn't attempt to break. She was watching me again, and the firelight, striking a gleam from her eyes, made them brilliant and expressionless. I stayed where I was, with my back to the now-fading sun. I had been leaning back against the window-sill. I found that my hands were behind me, pressed hard against the edge of the wood. They were hurting. I drew them away, and began slowly to rub them together.