The Sibyl in Her Grave (24 page)

“I suppose,” said Julia, with a rather weary sigh, “that I ought to ring her up and try to find out what she’s
talking about. But the trouble is that when one starts a conversation with Daphne there never seems to be any way of ending it. So what I thought I’d do—ah, there’s Ragwort.”

His attention drawn by her welcoming wave, Ragwort joined us at our table.

“Now,” said Julia, “let me pour you a glass of burgundy to keep the cold out and tell me all you know about the law on undue influence.”

“By all means,” said Ragwort. “But why do you want to know about undue influence? I wouldn’t have thought it was the sort of thing that usually arises in tax cases.”

“It isn’t, that’s why I’m asking you.” She handed him Daphne’s letter.

“Well,” said Ragwort, having read it, “I suppose the Reverend Maurice must be the elderly testator in question?”

“I can’t think of anyone else it could be. And I’m afraid the person she’s accusing must be Derek Arkwright—it sounds to me as if Maurice must have made a will leaving him something quite substantial. And what worries me is that the most likely time for him to have done that is the night he died.”

“Oh,” said Ragwort, looking rather stern.

“Yes,” said Julia, looking despondent.

“That is to say,” said Ragwort, “when the Reverend Maurice was gravely ill in hospital and possibly disoriented, and Arkwright was virtually alone with him for several hours?”

“Yes,” said Julia again, looking still more despondent.

“Well, it may be all right, of course, but on the other hand it may not. I really don’t think you can just sit back and do nothing.”

“No,” said Julia, renouncing with manifest regret the course of action most congenial to her temperament. “No, I don’t think I can. After all, I was rather fond of Maurice. If Derek really put pressure on him to do something he didn’t want to—”

“And we already know that Arkwright is a rather dubious character—quite apart from his using a false name, there’s the matter of the Virgil frontispiece.”

“Yes. So now you know why I want to know about undue influence.”

Ragwort’s exposition of the law on this subject, which included numerous references to decisions of the Court of Appeal,
obiter dicta
in the House of Lords and comments on both by distinguished academic writers, would doubtless have been of the greatest interest to my readers; but considerations of space unfortunately preclude me from setting it out
in extenso
. Julia and I listened in increasing admiration.

“Ragwort,” said Julia at last, “without doubting the depth of your learning on all matters of a Chancery nature, may I ask how you come to be so particularly well informed on this subject?”

“As it happens,” said Ragwort, “I was looking up the authorities on it only this afternoon. Terry Carver rang me up this morning to ask if he could come and talk to me about a legal problem, so I said that if he cared to have lunch with me here tomorrow I’d see if I could help. I’m rather hoping it’ll give me a chance to remind him about our bookcases.”

“And Terry’s problem also involves a question of undue influence?”

“Yes, it seems to. A friend of his has died and left him some money, and now some mischief-making harpy is trying to say the will is invalid. She’s written to the
executors making the most outrageous accusations and saying that she’s taking Counsel’s Opinion.”

“Oh dear,” said Julia. “Not the friend he was telling you about in Cannes? The one he was so badly treated by but went back to all the same?”

“Yes, it’s all rather sad. It was because he was ill, you see, that Terry went back, and he died soon afterwards. I’m afraid poor Terry sounded very down about it all. And this unpleasantness about the will is obviously making it worse.”

“Poor Terry, what a shame,” said Julia. “If there’s anything I can do to help—?”

With that warm camaraderie which is such an attractive quality of the Chancery Bar, my young friends agreed to combine their resources and in effect advise jointly on both problems: thus Terry would enjoy the benefit of Julia’s thoughts on his case and Daphne of Ragwort’s on hers. With this in mind, it was arranged that Julia should join Ragwort for his lunch with Terry on the following day.

Thinking that the lunch might prove to be an occasion of some interest, I enquired whether they would object to my being present.

“As long as Terry doesn’t mind,” said Ragwort, “we shall naturally be delighted. And I can’t see why he should.”

“We can tell him,” said Julia, “that you’re a distinguished academic lawyer whose advice we have sometimes found helpful. After all,” she added, in a tone of some surprise, “there is a sense in which one could say that’s actually true.”

From a woman who but for my own investigations might still have been languishing in a dungeon on the
wrong side of the Bridge of Sighs, my readers may think it a not unduly fulsome tribute.

Arriving in the Corkscrew on the following day a little after the appointed hour, I found Julia and Ragwort already installed there. Julia looked anxious; Ragwort looked severe. Between them sat the young man whom I had seen some months before on the floor of the Clerks’ Room at 62 New Square, uncomfortably entangled with a merchant banker and a ladder. On that occasion, however, I had failed to appreciate the full charm of his appearance: the topaz-coloured eyes under long, dark lashes; the golden smoothness of the throat; the singular beauty of the mouth, putting one in mind of Leonardo’s celebrated painting of John the Baptist.

“Hilary,” said Ragwort, “allow me to introduce Terry Carver. Who has just told us, however,” he added with the awe-inspiring severity of a judge about to pass the maximum sentence, “that he sometimes prefers, for reasons best known to himself, to be known as Derek Arkwright.”

I was unable to show the degree of astonishment that Ragwort had apparently expected: it had for some time been as clear to me as it has doubtless been to my readers that Terry Carver and Derek Arkwright were the same person.

“How do you do, Professor Tamar?” said the young man. His smile, though of great sweetness, had also a certain satirical quality, attractive and slightly disturbing—one might almost have said dangerous. “It’s very kind of you to take the time to talk to me. I must tell you straightaway that I’ve behaved extremely badly and made myself an embarrassment to my legal advisers. I’ve been trying to explain—”

“It’s no use trying to make light of it,” said Ragwort sternly. “What sort of impression do you think it’s going to make on a judge? There we shall be, putting you forward as a person of unquestionable respectability, and the first thing we have to tell him is that you’ve been using a false name. You must see—”

“Yes, Desmond, I do, truly I do, but when I told Maurice that my name was Derek Arkwright I wasn’t actually thinking about what would happen if he died six months later and left me some money and there were legal proceedings and I had to make a good impression on the judge—I simply did it on impulse.”

“But why? You talk as if it were a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to do on impulse—like eating a bar of chocolate or punching someone on the nose. Giving a false name isn’t like that at all—I’ve never felt the slightest urge suddenly to tell someone that my name was Marmaduke Hackingbush, and neither has anyone else I know. I simply don’t understand—”

“If you’d just let me explain, Desmond, it’s really perfectly simple. I didn’t want Daphne to know who I was.”

“Daphne? What’s Daphne got to do with it? Why should it matter to Daphne whether your name was Terry Carver or Derek Arkwright?”

“Because she’s my cousin. My second cousin, I suppose—her mother and mine were first cousins.”

I suggested that we should order lunch and that Terry should thereafter be permitted to tell his story without interruption.

“My mother came from a small town in Lincolnshire and all her family were very respectable and very boring.
All except for wicked Cousin Dolly, who ran away to London and worked in a nightclub and was never spoken of again. At least theoretically she was never spoken of again—it all happened more than forty years ago, long before I was born, and I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard of wicked Cousin Dolly, so actually, I suppose, she must have been spoken of a good deal.

“And my mother and her sister Isabel must have heard a good deal about her too, while they were still children, because as soon as she was old enough my aunt Izzie ran away as well and joined forces with her. So
she
was never spoken of either and my mother wasn’t allowed to have anything more to do with her. My mother, poor dear, grew up to be respectable and married my father and in due course—well, became my mother. After their parents died, though, she and Aunt Izzie started writing to each other. They didn’t see each other often—my mother didn’t like coming to London—but they got on well enough for me to be allowed to come and stay with Aunt Izzie sometimes.”

“And did you,” asked Julia, “enjoy your visits?”

“Well, I think I enjoyed them more when they were over and I was safely home, if you see what I mean. Aunt Izzie was still living with Cousin Dolly, you see, and Cousin Dolly scared me out of my wits—I thought she was going to eat me. Literally, I mean, once she’d got me nicely fattened up and while I was still young enough to be tender.

“I don’t quite know why I thought so—I’d probably heard of wicked Cousin Dolly at about the same time as I heard of the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel and I thought they did the same sort of things.

“But she was very fond of her food, and whenever I
went there she used to pinch me, quite hard, as if she were wondering—well, that’s what it seemed like. The grown-up half of me knew this was all nonsense, but the other half believed it absolutely—I always made sure to take plenty of exercise before I went there, so that I’d be too thin and stringy for her. I think she knew she frightened me, and was pleased about it.

“On the other hand, I got on rather well with Aunt Izzie. She was well into her forties by that time, but she’d taken much better care of her looks than Dolly had, and I thought she was tremendously glamorous and sophisticated. She told me all sorts of scandalous stories about people, quite famous people that I’d seen on television, and she took me to places that my parents would have been as shocked as anything about if they’d known—bars and nightclubs and so on.”

“Places,” said Ragwort sternly, “where it was quite illegal for you to be at that age.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but some of the places Aunt Izzie went to didn’t seem to mind much about things being illegal. And if she thought there was going to be a problem, she just dressed me up as a girl—like that I could pass for quite a fetching little eighteen-year-old.” The young man smiled demurely at Ragwort, who looked more severe than ever.

“I take it,” I said, “that Daphne was also part of this ménage? As I understand it, she was Dolly’s daughter.”

“Yes, that’s right, but I’m afraid I didn’t take much notice of her—she was about five years younger than me, and of course I never thought of her as being the same generation. Dolly had got married rather late in life, you see. To a man called Palmer, who died and didn’t leave her any money—that’s all I ever knew about him. That’s when she and Izzie started the fortune-telling
business. Cousin Dolly had always claimed to have some kind of psychic powers and done fortune-telling as a sort of hobby, Tarot readings for friends and so on, so she decided to try doing it professionally.”

“I thought,” said Julia, “that it was Isabella who claimed to be clairvoyant.”

“Well, not in those days. What Aunt Izzie did was collect information. If you’re going to be convincing as a fortune-teller you have to know things people don’t expect you to know—Aunt Izzie was very good at finding out things like that. She’d kept all the contacts she’d made when she was working at the nightclub and she knew an awful lot of things about an awful lot of people. She was quite systematic and organised about it—she had a huge filing cabinet, which she used to call her little box of secrets, with files on all their clients and everyone who might be useful when they wanted to know something. And she always read the newspapers very carefully, especially the financial pages—they had a lot of clients who were stockbrokers and that sort of thing.”

“In short,” said Ragwort, “the whole business was based on a confidence trick?”

“Well, no, not exactly—I mean, I’m quite sure Cousin Dolly really believed in her psychic powers. What Aunt Izzie was doing, as far as Dolly was concerned, was help her to interpret what she read in the Book. There was an old book she’d got from somewhere, very large and bound in leather, which was what she used for the most important prophecies. Readings from the Book were incredibly expensive, but its predictions were always right—if they seemed to be wrong, you’d either asked the wrong question or misunderstood the answer.

“I tried to have a peep at it once, when Cousin Dolly had been doing a reading and seemed to have forgotten to lock it away afterwards. But she came back and caught me and asked if I’d read any of it. I said I hadn’t, and she said she was glad about that, because one of the things it predicted was that any little boy who read it would be locked in the cellar and left there until the rats ate him, and wouldn’t that be a pity for a pretty little boy like me? And she pinched my arm until my eyes watered.”

Julia, much distressed, refilled Terry’s wineglass and was rewarded with a Leonardo smile.

“I’d stayed with them several times and was beginning to think of it as a regular feature of my school holidays, when there was a terrible row between my mother and Aunt Izzie—I’ve no idea what it was about. But they never spoke to each other again and of course I didn’t go and stay anymore. Even when I grew up and came to live in London, I didn’t try to get in touch again—I’d have felt I was being disloyal to my mother. Aunt Izzie sent us a card when Cousin Dolly died, and another with her new address when she moved down to Sussex, but my mother never answered. Then my mother died and I thought I ought to write and tell Aunt Izzie, but she didn’t write back.”