A Change of Heir (7 page)

As Gadberry sipped his sherry now, this small mystery seemed suddenly to assume a sinister significance – as indeed it had done before. He’d have liked to be able to ask Comberford how he had got the thing wrong. But this wasn’t possible, if only because he had no idea where Comberford was. The man had given him no address. He’d made no suggestion of any actual means whereby he might receive his half of the £5,000 a year as it came in; he’d merely murmured that all this would settle itself later. Presumably he had returned to Lulu and his Riviera leisure, and would communicate with Gadberry when he wanted to. But surely this was a crazy state of affairs? Surely, in the event of some unforeseen crisis, Gadberry ought to be able to get hold of the real Comberford at once? Yet it just couldn’t be done. There was no line through Mr Norval Falsetto and his agency. The Chester Court had known only Mr John Smith of the beard and the dark glasses. The second hotel Gadberry had not so much as noticed the name of, and he much doubted whether he could find his way to it if he wanted to. There were scores of such establishments in that part of London.

Not for the first time, Gadberry found himself wondering about the competence of Nicholas Comberford. Had he fixed up this whole imposture on a hopelessly amateur and ramshackle basis? Or was there something rather deep about him? These were disturbing questions, and no doubt it would be best to push them out of mind now and give this final fifteen minutes before dinner to a few pages of the
Memoirs
, as planned.

Gadberry opened the volume he had selected. It dealt with the first summer during which, upon his annual holiday at Bruton, the young Nicholas Comberford had been promoted to his own pony. This was as far back in the
Memoirs
as Gadberry had researched so far, and it was proving to be rich in valuable anecdotal matter. But Nicholas had been no more than five. How much about one’s five-year-old self does one remember? Gadberry found that he had to review his own authentic childhood in order to get a measure of what might be plausible in the case of his spurious one, and that this process of comparison was not without its dangers. It would never do to try feeding Aunt Prudence with reminiscences actually drawn from Gadberry and not Comberford family history.

Aunt Prudence
… Was it a little odd that he had really come to think of Mrs Minton as that? Gadberry closed the
Memoirs
. They just weren’t holding his attention. For here was another field of speculation which produced uneasy feelings. Of course it was very convenient that he had fallen so easily into his part. Every now and then, and with alarming unexpectedness, danger did appear. It wasn’t in the nature of the case that Bruton shouldn’t, so to speak, pack dynamite in its every mouldering corner. He might be betrayed, suddenly and irrevocably, in a hundred different ways. Yet his moments of actual panic had been few, and were becoming fewer. He was ceasing to believe that he could be exposed. But why was he ceasing to believe it?
Why?

Gadberry finished his sherry, glanced again at his watch, and for the first time gave himself a straight answer. It was because, all unconsciously, he was ceasing to believe that the imposture
was
an imposture. To put the matter very moderately, he was ceasing wholly and simply to believe that he was George Gadberry. There was an increasing component in him – one had to use some such word as that – which was quite willing to
be
Nicholas Comberford. It was this component that said, and thought, ‘Aunt Prudence’ so spontaneously.

A lay imposter (so to speak) might have judged this all to the good. But Gadberry, being a professional actor, understood the hazard it presented. Cease to be conscious of your part
as
a part, and in no time you will be playing it damned badly. He had been relying on his professional approach to safeguard him from what he had somewhere read about as the chief risk which imposters run. It was just this risk of losing grip on the fact that one
was
an imposter. As with actors, in fact, so with this particular form of criminal. Lose the sense of artifice, and the role dies on you. You may even come to believe that you really are what you set out to pretend to be. In other words, the job of being an imposter round the clock can play queer tricks with you, and finally send you off your rocker. Gadberry seemed to remember reading in a history book at school that Perkin Warbeck, or perhaps it was Lambert Simnel, had really believed himself to be one of the Princes in the Tower.

This was all very uncomfortable. Gadberry had no fancy for finding himself edged into something like a play by Pirandello. Gadberry pretending to be Comberford, however legally reprehensible, was rather fun. Gadberry believing himself to be Comberford was quite a different matter.

Of course all these fancies were merely morbid. There was no risk of anything of the sort really happening. Only he did find himself wishing he was in contact with just
one
person who
knew
he was Gadberry. It would even be a comfort to feel there was at least one person who
suspected
he was not really –

Gadberry pulled himself up abruptly. That way, surely, madness did veritably lie. But the thought had brought the true Comberford back into his head. Comberford was the only person in the world who knew who he – George Gadberry, living here at Bruton Abbey – authentically was. Gadberry found himself wishing that, every now and then, he could conduct a secret nocturnal telephone conversation with Comberford – this on the pretext of reporting progress, seeking advice.

What if he never saw, or heard of, Comberford again?

This extraordinary question sprang up in Gadberry’s mind just as he was getting to his feet for the purpose of making his way to Mrs Minton’s drawing-room. It seemed entirely senseless – but there it was. Suppose that Comberford had been acting in furtherance of some plot quite other than his declared one, and that this entailed his vanishing for ever? And suppose Comberford’s existence – as an entity, so to speak, distinct from George Gadberry – was unprovable? Suppose this to be so, and that Gadberry himself for some reason wanted to
stop
being Comberford? Suppose his conscience troubled him, so that he tried to
confess
? Would he be believed? Or would it just be taken for granted that poor Nicholas Comberford had gone mad, and had better be shut up in an asylum where he could scream his head off to the effect that he was really somebody called Gadberry?

Needless to say, Gadberry hadn’t taken ten paces down the corridor before he was able to assure himself that all this was utter nonsense, and that now he had better pull himself together. If he wanted to go not to an asylum, but to jail tomorrow in his own authentic character there was certainly nothing to stop him. He had only to ring up the local police and tell them the truth. But, of course, he wanted to do nothing of the sort. He was – he assured himself – enjoying the whole thing, and it was only the very fact of his pursuing his imposture so successfully that had perversely started these bizarre ideas in his head. Still, he saw that they were ideas which had, so to speak, a psychological basis. He had been so readily taken for Nicholas Comberford, the mantle was now so securely enfolding him, that he was in danger of succumbing to some primitive and irrational sense that he was being deprived of his own identity. There was insecurity in the very fact of his having – in another sense – achieved security so easily.Yes, that was it. A little steadied by this piece of self-analysis, Gadberry made his way to his dinner.

There had been a certain exaggeration in Comberford’s statement that Bruton Abbey was a Cistercian monastery in a very nice state of preservation. It was true, however, that it incorporated substantial parts of the actual fabric of such a place, and that this had certain curious architectural consequences. Gadberry’s quarters, having been in fact the Abbot’s lodging, were connected with the main building only by a long corridor of excessive gloom. Off this there opened on one side a series of cells. And they really were cells. Recalcitrant monks had been accommodated in them – presumably so that they could be suitably disciplined at any time under the personal supervision of their superior. The whole place, Gadberry thought, must have been like a nightmarish sort of public school. That was certainly why nineteenth-century Mintons had preserved it so carefully; it was an ideal setting for the virtuous discomfort which that era judged good for the soul. There was, no doubt, a certain amusement in having a drawing-room in which the stone benches of the original chapter house were still incorporated – as there was, too, in keeping guns and fishing rods in a particularly chilly calefactory. But what used to be called the Gothic Taste had surely had its day. If he ever really had to take Bruton in hand – which of course he wouldn’t have to do – he would begin operations by simply knocking it down. If, that was to say, it
could
be knocked down. For the whole place seemed as massive as the British Museum or St Paul’s Cathedral.

Boulter was lurking in the murkily glassed-in cloister. He considered it part of his duties to apprise Gadberry of any company to be encountered in the drawing-room.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘You will find that the old Sunday custom obtains.’

This was a new one; Gadberry hadn’t heard it before. Nevertheless the
Memoirs
enabled him to get on top of it in a moment.

‘Ah, yes,’ he replied easily. ‘The locals, eh?’

‘Precisely, sir. It was Mr Minton’s habit to set aside Sunday evenings for local society. The County would be entertained during the week.’

‘We don’t do much of that nowadays, do we?’

‘No, sir. I am afraid it must be a little quiet for you. Mrs Minton no longer feels an obligation to move much in her own circles. But there is an obligation, of course, in regard to the local people.’

‘The vicar, I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir – Mr Grimble. And Dr and Mrs Pollock.’

‘Well, that’s very pleasant.’ Gadberry moved towards the drawing-room door with an expression of mild good cheer. He didn’t in fact expect much entertainment from the society of either an elderly clergyman or an elderly sawbones and his wife. But unruffled good humour was his line at Bruton. Besides, such occasions did have what he supposed was a certain period charm.

He entered the drawing-room, said the right thing to Aunt Prudence, went round shaking hands with the three guests, and then said the right things to Miss Bostock. Miss Bostock, being only a superior employee, came last – but, by the same token, had to be accorded particular courtesy. Some minutes of suitably constrained general conversation followed. And then Boulter announced that dinner was served.

The dining-room at Bruton had been the refectory of the
conversi
or lay brethren. Although no longer three hundred feet long (much of it had disappeared) it would still have afforded a reasonably spacious setting for a City banquet. The six people now sitting down, therefore, would have presented to a dispassionate eye something of the effect of a small scurry of mice in a cathedral. It wasn’t warm; it wasn’t, in fact, other than exceedingly cold; but as snow was beginning to fall outside, this wasn’t altogether surprising. Gadberry found himself speculating a little apprehensively as to what the Abbey would be like when winter – a robust Yorkshire winter – really set in.

Mrs Minton had motioned Dr Pollock to the place on her right, so Gadberry did the same by the doctor’s wife. That meant having Miss Bostock on his left. She could do most of her talking with Pollock, Gadberry decided, and that would leave Mrs Pollock for him. The Pollocks were very low down on his danger list; although fairly long-established in the district, they hadn’t been around back in the days when the young Nicholas Comberford used to visit Bruton. Grimble was another matter. The tenth son, or thereabout, of some deceased Yorkshire bigwig, he had held the living of Bruton since the first day it had been at all decent to induct him into it. Fortunately that was incredibly long ago, and Grimble was so far sunk in senile confusion that people seldom attended to what he said.

‘Mr Grimble,’ Mrs Minton was saying in what Gadberry thought of as her grand manner, ‘will you please say–’

‘
Benedictus benedicat
.’ Grimble, who had a beard like an untidy bird’s nest, tumbled out the words, slumped into his chair, and grasped his soup spoon in a trembling hand. Nobody was surprised by this unbecoming conduct, since all had observed it in him before. Perhaps, Gadberry thought, he was systematically deprived of adequate nourishment by an unscrupulous housekeeper. More probably he was merely reverting to the first and uncorrected manners of his nursery. But now, not yet having been provided with anything upon which to begin blunting his appetite, Grimble was glancing impatiently up and down the table. His gaze fell on Gadberry – and stayed there.

‘Young man,’ Grimble said, ‘who are you? Who are you, I say?’

Nobody attended to this except Gadberry. He told himself instantly that it meant nothing at all, but this didn’t prevent his feeling a nasty shock, all the same. For one thing, although it was polite for the others to appear not to have heard, it was polite in him to make a friendly and unperturbed reply. ‘I’m Nicholas,’ he ought to explain. Or (remembering the
Memoirs
) perhaps he ought to expand to ‘I’m Nicholas, who brought the white mice into Sunday school’. Or would that be the wrong note? Would it be more courteous to concur (so to speak) in the assumption that something like a formal introduction was needed, and say with a bow ‘I am Mrs Minton’s great-nephew, sir. My name is Nicholas Comberford’?

‘Fellow hasn’t a tongue in his head.’

Gadberry realised that when he ought to have been saying something he had been thinking what to say. It didn’t, of course, really matter in this instance, but it did represent his breaking a rule. It was always better to trust to the spur of the moment than to give any appearance of a pause for calculation.